All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

Writing everything down. If I write it down, I will get to it (as long as it gets to your inbox and you process it regularly). I haven’t heard of anyone getting scolded for writing too much, but I have heard people getting in trouble because they didn’t.

If someone has ever asked you to meet about something, or is requesting a job to get done ASAP, don’t feel obligated to give an immediate reply. They should respect your time enough to let you look at your lists (calendar, tasks, etc.) before letting you get back to them.

Oh yeah, this requires you to briefly write down what they need before you walk away. It doesn’t make you look good when you have to ask them to repeat their question because you weren’t paying attention.

I’m probably treading on unsafe ground by saying this, but I download TV shows via torrents. Since I have a Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player, I burn these to CD-R disks for later viewing away from my computer. I’m not at home alone though, because my mom likes a few shows, too. (”House, M.D.“, and “Beauty and the Geek (2)”.

So how should we keep track of what we’ve watched? My idea is to just write my initials and my mom’s initials on the CD label. When I’ve watched it, I’ll just cross out my initials. When my mom’s watched it, she’d do the same. Another suggestion is to have a few spindles next to the DVD/Divx player. One would be labeled “To watch”, the other would be “Archives”.

Issue: What about the half-hour sitcoms? Should I burn these right away because CD-R media is so cheap, or should I wait 4 weeks so the CD-R will be filled up?

I remember reading about power strip liberators awhile back, but I never realized it was back in September 2005! Nevertheless, I think I’ll be needing to buy a pack of these. (Yes, need.) I have a lot of stuff that I’ve been plugging and unplugging to power different devices, like my shredder, cell phone, and bluetooth headset, all which use bulky power adapters. Hopefully with these, I’ll be worrying about that less and getting more things done as a result. There’s variations of these, from flat, pass-through, industrial, etc.

I mentioned a few months ago that I’ve reverted to using index cards for tasks. I recently heard Jason Womack in The Personal Productivity Show talking about using the right tool for the right job.

How have I been lately? Well, I’m back to monitoring tasks on my Tungsten E PDA. However, I still do write things down on index cards - if I don’t have my PDA with me.

What happened to the right tool for right job? For me, it’s best to have everything on my PDA. I don’t love messing with index cards as much. I will have a few places I have to process, so I can organize my stuff onto my PDA.

• Notepad on my PDA
• Loose index cards and scraps of paper
• The notepad tool on my cell phone (for the times when I have neither ink or paper)
• My voice mailbox

So basically, things get scribbled down, then I retype it into my organizer for better readability and ease of review. Right now, I’m feeling pretty comfortable with my system, so much that when time was freed up on Saturday, I was able to upgrade to WordPress 2.0.2.

What’s my point? Just figure out what’ll work out best for you, stick with it, and get to work!

I’ve been holding off upgrading due to partial laziness and fear of change. Also, I knew it’d take awhile for me since I have a page worth of plugins I had to check out. But, I’m pretty much liking how my WordPress.com blog feels, so I figured I should upgrade. (Plus, since WordPress 2.0.2 came out, I didn’t want to be prone to any bugs with 1.5.2.)

So far, all the big plugins work. However, I’m struggling with:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior - I’m fearing it’s power
• Running PHP within pages, because RunPHP didn’t work for me like I was hoping it would
• Re-tweaking the theme to the way it was before, such as the header and sidebar

Thanks to Podz for his “Upgrade to 2.0″ guide, and to Matt for his 2.0 Plugin Compatibility page.

I’ll update this post as things progress and get back to normal (whatever that means).

Update 1: I’m not going through my list from top to bottom, so I picked the easiest project - re-tweaking the theme. 20 minutes later, that’s crossed off and finished. Whee!

Update 2: I can’t get SRG Clean Archives to work with Exec-PHP. Viper007Bond got it to work, so hopefully he can help me out. I don’t think it’s the PHP plugin because myStatus 0.5 works. Also, I don’t think I’ll be seeing asides anytime soon.

Background: When I tried to run SpinRite 6.0 on my laptop, it reached a drive temp over 62°C, which is the maximum temperature they’re allowed to operate (or something along those lines).

Anyway, I emailed GRC support, and received this reply:

It appears that some laptops are not designed to work with DOS anymore and the temperature controls may only be available in Windows.

SpinRite will allow you, when you hit the temperature screen, to proceed with caution. It may be that the drive is not going to get much hotter and it may also be, as you suggest, that this is not really a problem because laptops generally have heat dissipation troubles and so characteristically run their drives hot. However, it may also be that your laptops fans or other cooling devices are controlled by Windows drivers and so your laptops cooling is not functional when outside of Windows and running SpinRite in DOS.

I didn’t get too much from this reply, so I held out on continuing the hard drive maintenence until I could solve the heat issue. Shortly following this email reply, I ran into “Our Dell Inspiron 1100 Notebook Computer Kept Overheating” and “Our Dell Inspiron 1100 Has Overheating Problems Again“.

Basically, I had to:

• remove a few screws and panels
• remove the heatsink and fan
• clean the cooling fins from dust
• [possibly] reapply thermal grease to the CPU
• reassemble

To me, this was a fairly daunting task, simply because I haven’t tinkered inside the workings of a laptop. But, my laptop was running hot anyway, so I was hopeful that this’d help cool things down.

Today: At work, I brought my laptop in and utilized the tools I have here in my office. I wasn’t planning on cleaning the CPU core and reapplying thermal grease, because I didn’t have any. The only issue I had was popping off the thin blue top plate. It’s really flimsy.

Tools:

• Compressed air
• Mini Phillips screwdriver
• Standard Phillips screwdriver
• Flatheat screwdriver

With the help of the pictures in the article mentioned above, I cleaned the dust out of the laptop, and SpinRite has been running for over two hours. The drive temperature has held steady for the past hour at 54°C. Awesome!

I’ll be using it later tonight to see if my lap and hands feel better with it. (Yeah, even the area below the keyboard gets a bit warm!) I’ll also put some pictures up, marking the areas where you need to use the tools. I took them with my camera phone, because my main one wasn’t here, but it’s a 1.3MP camera - it should be fine.

Lastly, it’d be in your best interest to read over the both the articles, and skim over the comments. Some of them have important insight, so they need to be taken into consideration.

Thanks to Dan for writing these articles!

Since I use Bloglines, I didn’t know of any easier way to subscribe to new feeds - until I saw LiveLines. Wow, amazing! ScreenGrab looks cool, too, so I’m writing that down here in case I’ll have need for it.

I was reading an article from PCWorld, and it mentioned using TweakUI to disable balloon tips. I don’t like installing something if I’m only going to run it once. That’s why I like Doug Knox’s tweaks. He has this specific VB script that does this for you. (Note: He uses frames, so the link below won’t show the header and menu.)

Disable Windows XP’s Balloon Tips (Doug Knox)

Golf clap: Steve Bass at PCWorld.com

I just noticed at my admin CP at WordPress.com is now using SSL. How cool is that? (I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I do know that logging in is now encrypted. Encryption is good.)