you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

Getting an extra monitor is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to improve efficiency. Many people spend a great portion of their day engaging in unproductive interaction with their computer, just rearranging windows so they can see their workspace. Depending on your resolution and the size of your monitor, a program’s menu bars can take up as much as a quarter of your screen. The smaller and lower resolution your monitor is, the more window rearranging you’ll have to do. Firefox menus and buttons, for example, can easily take up 100 pixels, if you leave all the toolbars in their default locations. On an 800×600 monitor, if you have the Windows taskbar at the bottom also, that’s about 1/5 of your screen gone.

Art programs are some of the worse offenders. Most of them have a dozen toolbars and info panes and toggling between tabs and turning windows on and off proves to be very tedious. In Photoshop, for example, I ordinarily keep the Info, History, Layers, Tools, Text, and Color windows open. This leaves a sliver of the actual artboard, if I were to work on my laptop. Sometimes I overlap the menus when I rearrange them and forget where I’ve put them. Flash is another great example of a program you need to spend a lot of time moving windows around. I had a 17″ monitor at Jupiter. I probably spent about 1/5 of my time moving things around so I could see my stage.

With a dual monitor setup, you can devote one entire screen to the menus and the other one to the workspace. All but the crappiest laptops come with a VGA port, so if you own a laptop, attaching an extra monitor is very easy. Most desktops, though, will require you to get another graphics card. I don’t think you can cheat and use a video splitter like this one. You can pick up a cheap video card for less than $30, and 19″ LCD’s now cost less than $200. This is one of the cheapest ways to upgrade and significantly increases productivity instantly.

This article had me cracking up at the office.

The pilot, upon realizing that the hijacker didn’t speak French, announced to the passengers that he would slam on the brakes as soon as the plane landed in order to throw the assailant off balance.

“The plan worked and, according to Spanish officials today, the hijacker, named as Mohamed Abderraman, tumbled over and dropped one of his guns before six men, including a Mauritanian mayor, stormed the pilot’s cabin and threw a pot of boiling water on his groin and chest.”

Ahaha! Let this be a warning to any potential hijackers: scalded crotch.

This is a pack of QQ instant rice vermicelli my dad bought. It is criminally misleading for the packaging to say 健康之選 (healthy choice). Not fried, so that means it’s healthy?! 151% of your sodium intake for one day in this little bowl.

My dad has high blood pressure and I keep telling him to read labels and not put so much salt in his cooking, but he doesn’t listen. I took a big red marker and circled the sodium content of the noodle and drew a big arrow pointing to it. I don’t know if he saw it. But everyone should read food labels. It’s literally a matter of life or death.

This is a red maneki neko (招き猫), a “beckoning cat”. It’s holding a golden plaque that says shigoto un (仕事運), which means “good luck at work” (lit: work fortune). He’s actually less orange in real life.

I should take this guy to my office instead of leaving him at home. It’s meant to bring you good luck at work. The raised hand is a “come here” gesture. The Japanese gesture for signaling for someone to come over looks like our “bye-bye”, but it’s just the American version of “come here” with palm facing down instead of palm up.

I bought this guy about 7 years ago, before I went to Japan and knew what the words said. It just looked cute in the store.

I am pretty sure the dai kichi (大吉: big fortune) sticker isn’t stuck on him like that. I think it was on the top of the box he came in.

This is my client’s Dell which kept blue-screening right after you select Safe Mode, Normal Mode, Last Known Good Configuration. No matter what you did, it blue screened. It belongs to my client’s daughter, a high school student who has beat the crap out of it. I tossed in my bag and brought it home over Christmas for repairs.

A week or two later, when I went to repair it, I noticed all kinds of goofiness. Some of the USB contacts inside the slot were actually broken off, which I’ve never seen before. I removed the hard drive and tried to connect it to a USB adapter. Windows recognizes the drive, but wouldn’t assign a drive letter to it. After repeated attempts on two machines, I gave up trying to read from the old drive.

I had a spare lying around, so I formatted it and stuck it inside the Dell. Now came the next problem! I hadn’t noticed that this laptop in fact had NO drives! I didn’t notice earlier and figured that the client’s daughter would probably have destroyed them also by now. But this was not before I spent an hour trying to make a 3.5″ boot disk. So, now I had a drive, but no way to get Windows on it.

Well, I thought, I was pretty screwed! Next, I tried for another 3 hours to make a bootable USB keydrive. No luck there.

5 hours have now passed and I hadn’t gotten anywhere. I was getting pretty annoyed at myself when I finally realized how idiotic I’d been. I could probably boot directly from the CD. I had an old DVD drive lying around and a USB to IDE adapter. Why not try to boot from CD? It probably won’t work, but it’s worth a try.

This was where a computer manufacturer actually surprised me with sensible design for once. This machine’s firmware had all the boot capabilities built in and I could boot from CD, floppy, or the network. I thought it would’ve been a pain to try to load from a CD because in the past, I had to first copy some CD-ROM drivers to a bootable floppy and then boot from that. I hadn’t even considered changing the BIOS settings this time. But when I heard the drive spin and load up Windows, I kept holding my breath because something actually working was a miracle I couldn’t believe. But, I was able to complete the installation from this rickety setup.

This laptop is actually very well designed. It’s compact and runs remarkably fast. Even on the 256 MB of RAM it had in it. Kudos to Dell.

This topic has come up quite a few times and today, I was finally pushed over the edge into the PDF cowpie. I have to write about it now and bitch. PDF is CRAP! It’s Adobe’s Portable Document Format. The problem is, it’s not very portable. You need the damn Acrobat Reader, which is a 21 MB download! The program is slow to load and annoying as hell because the application grafts onto your browser and runs in a window, but it has its own interface which is not consistent with many other programs. For example, “Find” is a pair of binoculars, not the standard magnifying glass.

Then there’s the problem of PDF abuse. Most people just use it as a container format. They just dump JPEG’s and crap into it and ship it out. That is NOT how it’s supposed to work. Today, on Lombardi’s Pizza’s website, I wanted to look at their take-out menu. There’s a link for their 2-page PDF, which is 2 GIANT JPEGs!

They’re just scans of their paper menu. WTF?! Just leave it on the website as a JPEG or a GIF. Those are the ULTIMATE portable document formats. What browser can’t read a JPEG or a GIF? Most MP3 players with screens can display photos even.

So, instead of two 50k GIFs at 4 colors (that’s all you really need), this PDF is a whopping 888k!

…that I designed and never got used. It was meant to be a tips and tricks text area. But we replaced it with a HUGE 300×250 ad! Oh well, now I have some colored lightbulbs to use for other projects!

well.. not snow.. it’s actually hail. Getting to work this morning was painful– walking 15 minutes into headwinds with ice pellets stinging my face. Good thing I had a book with me. I put it in front of my face and it did the trick.

here are some photos I put up on Flickr.

..and so did Nintendo

10 is a nice round number, not 12. 10 fingers, 10 toes. Volume knobs go to 10. 10 little Indians. 10 Commandments. 10 eggs. Makes perfect sense. 12?

I don’t know where this concept of a dozen comes from (though 3 seconds on Google will tell me.) Then there’s the “baker’s dozen” which is 13, not 12.