Category: Life hacks

Biblically fit

Just how far and seriously are you going to take your faith?

My weight, eating habits are one area I keep falling down on. Over the last 3 years I’ve lost close to 30 lbs., but I still have a good 20 lbs to go and I’m still stuck in the same rut/spot.

But maybe this will help inspire me… from Tripp Fuller’s Doctor

“it’s hard to consume 2000 more calories than you need and large amounts of meat that took even more energy to produce when our sisters and brothers in Christ are starving around the world.”

I missed the gym on Saturday and yesterday due to other things on my schedule – better do everything I can to get back to the gym tonight – and better get me a new workout strap for my Zune so I have some motivation while I’m working out.

Maybe I should put the photo that really kicked start my weight loss a few years back on my Zune as well. Let me tell you – I was a fatty McFatty.

I don’t have that photo online yet – but here’s a photo just a few months before the other one was taken:

hbk and jdb

Label your Thumb Drives

If you’re prone to losing your Thumb Drives – or just afraid it might happen some day, Lifehacker has a great tip/hack to label your drive with your name, phone number or other information.

Here are the basics:

I created a next text file in Notepad, typed the word:

[autorun]

And saved it to the root directory—the “main” area of your drive, not in a folder—as autorun.inf.

I chose a big yellow smiley face for my icon but any brightly colored, unusual icon will be easily noticed. I copied the icon to the root directory of my thumb drive and renamed it myicon.ico.

Then I opened my autorun.inf file and added this text:

icon = .\myicon.ico
label=My Name (mobile xxx-xxx-xxxx)

(Of course, you will substitute your name and your mobile number for the above text.) I saved the file and marked it “read only” and hid it (just as an added sense of security—a lot of people have not learned how to tweak their “Show hidden folders” settings and, thus, will not be tempted to delete or
edit the file.)

I gave this a try and it works like a charm. If you recall, I wrote about some great software ihoundsoftware.com back in Dec. and this works right alongside the software. I simply edited the autorun file that was already saved on my drive and added my name and phone number.

Here are a couple screen shots showing the final results:

Green Tip

This came from a co-worker on our office’s Green Team:

The website changethemargins.com is calling for printer owners everywhere to take the simple step of, well, changing their margins from the current luxurious standard 1.25 inches to a the more modest .75 inches. It may sound like a small change, but if everyone in the nation did it, we’d save a little less than a Rhode Island’s worth of trees every year. Does tinkering with Word’s cumbersome preferences scare the fonts right out of you? Another goal of the site is to petition Microsoft to change the default margins on all its Office products.

Changing your margins in Microsoft Word:
Go to “File,” then “Page Setup.”
Once on “Page Setup,” click the “Default” key, and you’ll be offered “Do you want to change the default settings for the page set up? This change will affect all new documents based on the normal template.”

Set each margin to .75 and save an immense amount of paper.

Getting things done

I’m really impressed with the Getting Things Done system. I haven’t figured out a way to make it work for reals in my life yet – but I’m trying to get into the swing of things.

I’m curious if anyone has any insight on this. I started a new job in December for the DCCCD. As part of my job there are e-mails flying from every which direction about all sorts of curriculum based/catalog issues. As I’m learning my job I’m trying to process a lot of these emails but I also know that many of these things really don’t have a lot to do with me (or maybe they do and I just don’t realize it yet). I was fairly successful at keeping my e-mail inbox at 0 in my previous jobs but I’m not doing as well here.

We also use Novell GroupWise (argh!) and it stores all the messages on the server – so even if I moved e-mails to other folders to get them out of the way – apparently they’re still saved on the servers and IT doesn’t like all those e-mails clogging up the system.

UPDATE: Forgot to add that we tend to print almost all emails for record keeping – especially when it comes to any changes to the catalog and curriculm.
Any thoughts or helpful tidbits?