Month: August 2006

Cubicle to Couch

 

Wendy Boswell of Lifehacker has done it ! The Boswell family has apparently been planning this for a while. They both had side business which were making money. They had decided on a threshold, when reached, they would quit their daily jobs and get full time on their side businesses.

Wendy has documented the stuff that they have been thinking about, and what anyone should think about, when making a change (or thinking about a change).

Check the post here.

Migration complete

Done.

All my blogger posts are in here in wordpress now.

All my archived posts have been nicely categorized.

There are some things which bugged me during the transition but all in all, it was a pretty painless move. The php script did its job meticulously and diligently. There was just one time it hiccupped and just stopped and gave a 404 message. And my heart just stopped beating. But after that, I resetted the script and ran it again, and it ran to completion. There was also the issue of bad formatting on my blog spot and wordpress after the move. The issue was a wide line, in one of my posts. This pushed the right side tool bar all the way down, making the blog look horrendous. Apparently many people faced this issue, so finding the problem/solution on google was a breeze.

Moving in Progress

This blog is in the process of moving from blogger to here.

Please update your bookmarks.

Update: I am almost done with the categorizing the archived posts. Should be done today for this. I will resume posting after that.

I may also possibly tweak around the templates a little bit. Keep coming back.

Death to Cubicles …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meandered my way to this awesome Fast Company article

titled Death to Cubicles.

Collaboration is great, but sometimes I’d kill for a door. …. Fittingly, this outburst took place just down the road from the University of Colorado, where in 1968, a fine-arts professor named Robert Propst came up with the “Action Office.” Propst’s vision was to give white-collar workers, then toiling amid rows of desks in huge open spaces, both more privacy and a way to individualize their space. By that measure, cubicles were an improvement. But in the hands of space-mad facilities planners, the idea was perverted to justify an officescape that resembled the Chicago stockyards. Dilbert was born. Scott Adams got rich.

Nicely written. Read the full article here.

Zero Based Budgeting

Getting Finances Done has a very nice write up on zero-based budgeting.

The basic concept here is that, all money coming in will be spent either  by ‘actual’ purchases, or on paper. In other words, every penny/paisa/cent should be accounted for on paper. If it goes into savings, or into investment, wherever, it goes on to a spreadsheet row. Total income – total exp = 0 Check out the post here.

Stay focussed at work

Dave Cheong in his most enriching blog, has a nice post on 18 ways to stay focussed at work. Makes a very interesting read. I have started implementing a couple of the tips. It has been working out well until now. Some interesting tips are :

Write out a daily task list and plan your day.

Setup filters in your email.

Clean up your desk.

Change your mindset and make work fun.

Read the full list here.

Update: Found another Being Focussed article on the same blog. Man, this guy is amazing. Check out his list of things to do, for keeping his blogging consistant:

  • Having a goal to write 120 articles in a year.
  • Working on 3 articles each week, or 2 paragraphs in each sitting.
  • Prioritising bill paying before working on writing tasks.
  • Tracking the number of posts I have done each week.
  • Planning the topics for future articles in advance.
  • Taking time out to do searches on Technorati and Google.
  • Waking up at 5:30am and working on an article before work.
  • Asking my wife to wake me up if I fail to get up on my own.
  • Unplugging the Xbox to remove distractions.
  • Watching TV to relax my mind after completing an article.
  • Visualise the growth in subscribers to my feed to maintain motivation.

Wow !

Typing this from MS Live Writer

This is very neat. I am impressed. The UI is clean and uncluttered. All the important aspects are present. Formatting buttons, buttons to include pictures and links. Nice.

However one bummer (as of now) is I cannot publish pictures through Live writer to Blogger. Apparently blogger will not allow me to.

Download the live writer [here]

Update: Uploading the below image through blogger.com

Outlook Update

Yes. I have been using Outlook completely for about a week now. I am a happy camper until now. No mishaps. I have set up a few filters. I am wholly on INBOX ZERO (an idea, I had read about in fellow blogger Merlin Mann’s 43 folders).

Basically, every email that lands in my box gets a priority/action associated with it. It either gets filed into a folder, or gets deleted, or stays in my INBOX if it requires an action from me. It gets a red flag, if it is a deadline oriented task (or has an appointment linked to it – so that I will not have to toggle to/back from the calendar mode).

So far so good.