How does your company handle this? Do you donate money or time if you use putty or Firefox? Do you think they should?

BitTorrent is an awesome protocol and works really well. It has made moving large files like video podcasts around the internet much less painful.

What I don’t understand is why its so hard for Bram to use his own domain and install some blogging software so his posts come from a more credible source than LiveJournal.

[tags]rants, bittorrent, livejournal, mark cuban, bram cohen, technology[/tags]

In September my wife and I finally moved gyms to one that would be on the way home from work. This saved us from driving about a half hour in the wrong direction.

Our billing date was September 15th and I canceled on the 12th and was told that I wouldn’t get charged. Of course I was charged but I had everything written down in my Moleskine.

It rescued me because on the notebook half I had written down in detail who I had talked to and what they said, at what time and obviously the date. I’ve had too much trouble before with sort of thing so I’ve learned my lesson.

I wrote the gym a letter detailing my transactions with all these people plus including a copy of the cancellation letter and the fax receipt saying they received it. The next day I got a calling saying they would refund my money and sorry for the trouble. It’s very hard to argue when you can present a detailed time line.

Here’s a list of other things to write down:

• Canceling anything, write down who you talked to and the time and your cancellation number (This saved me when I canceled DSL and they continued to charge me and didn’t refund the previous month of service, even though it didn’t work)
• Ordering a major item or service
• Bills paid and when you mailed them
• Any inquiries you make about services – write down who told you, what they said and the price quote

If you think of any others, leave them in the comments.

[tags]moleskine, gtd,  record keeping, saving money, money[/tags]

New Features:

Google made some major updates to Google Reader which makes it really usable. Before it was a bit awkward and didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Now it looks great and functions exactly how you think it should, here are the features I really like:

• You can access it anywhere
• Good HTML Support (you’d think this would be obvious but then you must not have used embedded IE)
• Embedded mp3 Support – I have a lot of podcasts in my feeds, this makes it really handy to listen to the short ones as I process my articles
• Keyboard shortcuts – this is probably the best feature – my hands don’t leave the keyboard

My Workflow:

Here’s how I work. I process first, I just determine whether the article is interesting and open it, I read later:

• Shift + N -> Move to the next feed
• Shift + O -> Open that feed
• Spacebar -> page through the feed (Possibly doing a Shift + A to mark all read if it bores me)
• v -> opens that articles link in a new tab (with Firefox obviously)

Summary:

Google Reader has replaced SharpReader which was my desktop feed reader for years (Rant: To mark all read in SharpReader its Ctrl+Shift+R – human hands weren’t meant to contort like that!) It’s a very efficient way of managing my current RSS feeds and has saved me quite a bit of time. Google always amazes me. I thought Reader was a very mediocre product but they really redeemed themselves and pulled off an excellent transformation with this release.

[tags]google, google reader, rss, sharpreader, gtd, feeds[/tags]

Firefox has some very weird licensing going on with their artwork so you can’t patch Firefox and release it yourself with the original artwork. Debian’s solution was to create their own GPL’ed artwork and rename Firefox to IceWeasel. I really can’t blame Debian for forking it plus IceWeasel is a cool name. Some of the best software in the Open Source community has been created when one programmer saw a different direction to take a piece of software.

Here are 5 Reasons to Support IceWeasel.

And then 5 Reasons to Kill it.
[tags]firefox, iceweasel, gpl, debian, artwork[/tags]

The good thing about him being away is that I get to appreciate everything he usually does around the house.

Lefties and fountain pens don’t mix too well. Unfortunately, the alphabet we use was developed by righties, for righties. All you lefties know the result of a long day of taking notes in school; a nice stained side of your hand. Fountain pens are worse because you lay down more ink and it dries slower than your usual ballpoint pen.

Here’s how you can deal with that whilst using a fountain pen:

1. Quick drying ink – if you’re smearing the ink as you write, try a quick drying ink like Parker’s Quink.
2. Use a sacrifical piece of paper – Fold an 8″ x11″ piece of paper in half and use it under your hand. This is easy for lefties because most have the lefty curl while writing. This will blot the ink its sitting on top of and keep your hand out of what you’re writing.
3. Don’t let others use your fountain pen – once you use your fountain pen for long enough you start to wear the nib down to the angle that you write. If someone else uses your pen for too long they’ll ruin your angle and make your nib feel scratchy.

Your only other choice is to pull a DaVinci and write in mirror script. Oh, and lefties, don’t forget the meeting to pick the next US president next month, sshhh.

Another helpful site: Lefthanded Writing Page

[tags]lefthanded, left, handed, lifehack, fountain pen, writing[/tags]

The only good thing about it is all the small networks like TBS, UPN and the WB actually get some viewers while Bush gabs on for hours.

[tags]politics, rant, state of the union address, state, union, address, funny[/tags]