DisSuggs4u

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge fan of TiVo. (And, for the record, I am talking to the actual TiVo box and service. Not that crappy cable company provided DVR which pales in comparison to an actual TiVo. My official opinion and comparison of such shall have to wait until another post.)

One of the best things about TiVo, other than the ability to “shift time” and watch programs when I want to and not be a slave to the TV schedule, is its ability to skip past commercials. Sure, you can press the fast forward button on either the TiVo or a craptastic cable company DVR to speed through the commercial breaks while watching a recorded program. However, what I am talking about is not only something that cannot be found your normal DVR, other than the handful of ReplayTV owners out there, but also something that I am not sure many existing TiVo users even know about. (Continued)

In a previous post, I commented on just how much spam I had received during a one-month time frame. At the time of the post, on 17 November, I had acquired 5,481 spam e-mail messages.

A little under a month later, on 12 December, I updated the post to indicate that the total number of e-mail messages in my spam folder had risen to 7,184.

Now, (Continued)

It has been a number of weeks since my last post, and the main reason behind that is that I have not had the time to write. Between the insanity surrounding the year-end holiday season, work commitments revolving around proposal writing and attending oral presentations, and several projects in and around the house, I simply ran out of time to write. Or, as my wife would more correctly point out, I failed to “make” time to write.

This concept of “making time” was foreign to me, I must admit, until my wife introduced it to me shortly after we started dating. Up until that point, I ran through life being a slave of time and often not being able to get things done because I “ran out of time.”

Since adopting her “make time” philosophy, I have to admit that I feel much more control over my life. As an added bonus, I am now able to spend more time being productive as opposed to “wasting” time. It is a great feeling to no longer be a victim of time and to instead take charge of my schedule.

This also fits very well with the whole Getting Things Done (or, as I like to say, Getting “Stuff” Done) work/life management system. I plan on writing more in the future about how I have implemented GTD in my life.

For now, I will just say that I am going to work hard to make time for this blog.  I may not post every week, but I will continue to post.

So, we are right around the corner from Microsoft finally unleashing their next operating system, Windows Vista, upon the public. I cannot help but think that this will be another mediocre product from the folks in Redmond. This will not be for lack of effort or for trying to be all things to all people. Far from it. However, I do believe that this is also the main reason why Vista will not be good in the long run.

You see, with Vista, Microsoft fails to even remotely consider one of the basic principals of product development: K.I.S.S. How do I know this? Well, for starters, (Continued)

Most people do not know this about me, but I am a sucker for watches. Be them for the wrist or the pocket, nothing piques my interest more or gets my imagination rolling like the beauty of a well designed timepiece.

The category of my object of obsession is specifically limited to those watches with a mechanical movement. None of that digital, quartz, atomic-synched, battery powered mumbo jumbo with a combination altimeter, gps, heart rate monitor, and tea timer for me. No, I much prefer (Continued)

So, a little under a month ago, I wrote about the global e-mail plague.

Well, It seems as though things have gotten worse. As of this writing, the spam filter on my e-mail client of choice has nabbed 10,686 messages.

Since e-mail older than 30-days automatically gets trashed, that means I have received almost 11,000 spam messages in a month.

Wow.

I stumbled across this the other day and thought I would share with those who care.

Though I do not have to access it often, there are some times where it is helpful to change a particular setting within an application to suit whatever the immediate need is. And, while it is really easy to do this by simply clicking on the application name from the menu bar and then clicking on “Preferences..”, if there is a keyboard shortcut for the same action, then I am all over it because they usually save lots of time.

Enter: Command-comma.

Use it whenever you want to open up the preferences for the application currently in “focus.”

Granted, this is not earth shattering, but it definitely is a time saver. And, it totally beats the pants off of anything Windows has to offer. (Please, if anyone knows of a keyboard shortcut in Windows that does the same thing as Tools -> Options, please pass it along.)

Last January, my wife and I took the plunge and purchased one of the (at the time) new iMacs from Apple with the Intel Core Duo processor. This decision did not happen overnight. In fact, it had been something I was contemplating for well over a year before I actually made the purchase. Being a (for the most part) lifetime PC user, I needed to make sure that the transition was going to be as smooth as possible.

Let me just tell you, it could not have been any easier. (Continued)