General

Take everything lightly today

In General on 1 April 2006 with 1 comment

Public Service Announcement: Today is April Fool’s Day - Whatever you read today on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt. Thank you.

Going plugin crazy

In General, WordPress on 22 March 2006 with 1 comment

I haven’t been myself lately, so that’s why I’m lacking recent quality posts.

I’ve installed two WordPress plugins yesterday that I think deserves your consideration:

WP-Print is great because it “displays a printable version of your WordPress weblog post”. It removes all formatting except for the most relevant content: post title, post content, and the full URLs contained in the post, kind of like the ones in SitePoint plaintext newsletters (example). It’s great when links displayed like this for print because normal links on printed paper mean nothing.

Lately, I’ve been printing articles to read later (or maybe things my mom or friends might find interesting). If blogs would use this plugin, it would be much easier to follow up on the links.

As for Flickr Post Bar, it’s much easier not having to navigate through Flickr to get the code for a post. You can insert the latest photos from your photostream, or search tags - all within the post page.

It’s finding gems like these that make me wonder if I should just stick to just blogging here rather than splitting myself also at Bryan Off Topic…

Unresponsive script when managing categories

In General, WordPress on 15 March 2006 with no comments

I’m not getting a reply in my post in the WordPress.org forums, so I’m bumping it by posting here as well.

When I try to delete empty categories, Firefox [1.5.0.1] will hang for a few seconds before displaying a warning:

“A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.”

I’m running WordPress 2.0.2.

Thanks!

Tip for tracking who watched what

In General on 13 March 2006 with no comments

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?

Power strip liberator

In Electronics, General on 13 March 2006 with 1 comment

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.

Back to PDA for almost everything

In General on 12 March 2006 with 1 comment

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!

Finally upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2

In General on 11 March 2006 with 4 comments

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.

I feel as bad as I look. Yeah, in my case, that must be pretty bad. What’s worse than one hour of driving? One hour of driving in stop-and-go traffic. At least work was okay and lunch was good.

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All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin