Take care of your eyes

Times of India New Delhi Edition
31 Oct 2008

The eyes perform one of the most important functions of the body and it is very important to take good care of them. Things you need to know about your eyes: Headaches can be caused by eye strain and they can get worse by extensive use of eyes Good…

Reading this story reminded me of a CNN Tech news clip I watched yesterday with tips on laptop security. There are many ways in which you can protect your laptop. The reporter said there is a 1 in 14 chance that your laptop will be stolen at some point in your life (not sure what that stat is based on but it seems plausible). I’ve embeded the news clip below, please check it out!

This story also speaks to the importance of photography backup. My grandfather always used to joke when I took photos with the digital camera and he called it the “dhokha camera” or “fraudulent camera” because he didn’t use a computer and once a photo was taken, he’d probably never see it. However, the point of photos is to enjoy and cherish memories – so if you don’t want to get them printed, there are many other options out there. For example, photo storage services like Flickr, Picasa, or a self-hosted Coppermine gallery on your website, or just burning all your photos onto CD’s or DVD’s. It’s always good to have a backup.

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Followup

A good post by Buzz Bishop about photo storage tools available online. “There are two rules about baby photos. 1) Back them up. 2) Back them up.” :)

When you log into RTM, you’ll see a tag cloud on the right. This shows the size of different categories of tasks based on how many tasks are in that category. I think it helps somewhat, to give you a reality check of what your life is currently focused on and perhaps what you’re ignoring. However, I think what would be even better is (I’m giving away a secret here) an idea that I had for an application: you type in all your tasks, give them an urgency and importance (borrowing from First Things First), and then the tag cloud automatically arranges all your tasks right there in front of you. The largest ones have the greatest value of urgency + importance. When you finish a task, you can click “x” to delete it and the other tasks automatically adjust in proportion. Anybody out there willing to make this and give it to me as a birthday gift? :)

2) RTM & Gmail

You can connect your RTM to Gmail. For those of you who use Gmail regularly, and people like me who are almost constantly logged into Gmail, RTM can be displayed as a right-sidebar in your Inbox folder. You will see all of your tasks there and you can also type in tasks on the fly. It is synched with your RTM account.

3) RTM & Twitter

You can have RTM send you reminders on Twitter, and you can send tweets to the RTM Twitter account which will be sent directly to your RTM account (and then could also show up in your Gmail sidebar if you’ve got it installed).

4) RTM & SMS

You can have your RTM tasks sent to your Google Calendar, which can send you an SMS reminder for each task, or have RTM directly send you an SMS.

5) RTM & Browser

RTM also has browser extensions which can always keep you on top of your tasks. You can add a “Add to RTM” link on your browser which can send tasks to your RTM account.

You can find all this and more in the RTM help section.

Back in the day (as in.. a few months ago), you would have your entire Facebook friends list as one. Inviting people to events was both tedious and risky. You might invite the wrong person, and your finger would be tired by the time you got through the list.

Whether you’re doing marketing and promotions on Facebook for businesses or non-profits, you’ll want to make sure your event, group and page invitations get to the right people. So how can you do this? Well I’ve already talked about making multiple profiles. Although FB doesn’t like it – I think it’s a matter of choice. I have several profiles. One for strictly personal, family, fun stuff. Another for professional, work-related stuff. And yet another for marketing and community relations.

So how do you manage all those lists? The way to do it is to SEGMENT. You  need to go to your Friends list, and make individual lists of your friends. You can do this in the right-column beside where all your friends are listed. You can make as many lists as you like, and add friends individually or in bulk to each list.

Here’s an example of practical usage. You are on Facebook doing marketing for Barack Obama. You have 300 friends, from various locations throughout the USA. If you make seperate lists for the region of the country in which those friends live, such as East Coast, MidWest, etc., you can invite particular people to relevant Obama campaign events, groups, and pages. This will allow you to more effectively target your campaign marketing. Segmenting your audience list is a standard practice of email and conventional marketing, so it is no stretch to also apply it to your Facebook marketing.

Are you using lists? Any extra tips on this topic? Please share :)

-k.s.

So just over a year ago, I purchased a new Dell Inspiron 9400 from the Dell.ca website. For the first eight to ten months, the battery would last at least 1.5 if not two hours without a recharge. Recently, however, whenever I’d pull out the power cord, the battery would give strange numbers about how much power is remaining. It would say something like “28 minutes…” and just a few minutes later it would say “8 minutes.”

So I decided to call up Dell technical support and was introduced to a catch in their sale of notebooks. The 3 year warranty with CompleteCare that I have apparently does not extend to the battery. I was not made aware of this at the time of purchase, and the friendly voice on the phone now told me that usually the battery is only covered for the first year. So I thought, “well that’s alright – I am within the first year right?” Sadly I was informed that I was just a few weeks past the first year mark and therefore the battery was no longer covered.

Then, the friendly voice on the phone said, “But what I can do for you, sir, is connect you to our [forget the name] department and they can quote you on the price of a new battery.” The tone with which he gave me this sales pitch, as if he was doing me a huge favour by connecting me to a sales person to purchase a new battery because this battery had barely lasted a year, was priceless.

In any case this post is just a heads up to all those who own or are planning to purchase a Dell notebook. Check your battery regularly and if it has issues, get them fixed within the first year. :)

stay in high spirits,

-k.s.

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Photo Source: Kansir

Dot Be Gone
The reason I’m posting this is because I had always told people to e-mail me at the address with the dot, and then regretted it because it’s just annoying to mention the dot. So now I can just tell people to e-mail me without the dot. I have to admit I am still a little suspicious because I thought somebody else already had my e-mail without the dot, but I guess not.

Keep the Dot
One thing to keep in mind is, even though your e-mail address without the dot will work, if you originally signed up with the dot, that will remain your username when you login to your e-mail.

Dot’s all folks.

You’ve probably noticed that in the new WordPress 2.5 series Admin Panel, the navigation menu items (Write, Manage, Design, Comments) are split from the option / settings menus (Settings, Plugins, Users). Personally I don’t like it separated, but I haven’t yet had time to fix it.

What I’ve done in the meanwhile is make the sizes same of the links on the left and the links on the right. The way to do this is:

In your wp-admin/wp-admin.css file, replace:

#wphead a, #dashmenu a, #adminmenu a, #submenu a, #sidemenu a {
text-decoration: none;
}

with

#wphead a, #dashmenu a {
text-decoration: none; }

#adminmenu a, #submenu a, #sidemenu a {
text-decoration: none;
font-size: 12pt;
}

That’s it – now the links on the left and right will be the same size. I like it better because I check the “Settings” and “Plugins” almost as often as I write a post or manage comments.

Also if you want to make the sub-navigation links (the ones in the white, below the navigation links) a different size, like maybe 11pt, use this:

#wphead a, #dashmenu a, #adminmenu a, #submenu a {
text-decoration: none; }

#submenu a {
font-size: 11pt; }

#sidemenu a {
text-decoration: none;
font-size: 12pt; }

-k.s.