Pink Floyd.

Many times people have asked me : “Hey, what computer should I buy?” or “Can you make a website” or “Can you build a computer?”. They knew I graduated a Computers college. I explain them that we specialize in a tiny area of computer science and only that can be more vast than other disciplines, not related to computers. I tell them that I can write software programs but I don’t have the knowledge to write a computer game or a website with animation. And that I am not a god with Excel.

Probably a brain surgeon feels the same when asked to tell his cousin what to do about that itchy pain in the leg.

Cellphone, PDA, laptop, desktop computer from home, desktop computer from work. Personal email, work email, paper notes.

Favorites from internet explorer, favorites from mozilla, links sent by friends on email.

Movies, music, documents, pictures, programs.

Power outage, hard disk failure, email size limit, mobility, accesibility.

Today there is an abundance of electronic devices to take notes on, to store data on. We reveive tones of information on email - personal and from work, there are so many interesting articles, songs, pictures that we want to keep track easily, to access them easily and to store them safely. Losing all our pictures from the last 5 years would be a catastrophic event. Probably soon insurance policies will even be invented for such events.

When you go visit your aunt from Kingdom Far Away, you feel the need of showing her pictures from the trip you did last year.

When you want to remember something, you take a note on your calendar and a email will popup as a reminder. Some email companies provide the possibility of notifications directly on your mobile.

When you drive your car and you have a brilliant idea, you quickly record an audio note on your mobile. Then at work when another idea comes that you want to remember, you will probably send an email to your personal adress.

When you go for a 3 weeks business trip on another state, you will feel the need of accessing the 300 GB collection of data you have on your desktop computer from home.

I found myself in most of this situations. Another challenge that I always face is to have at little redundancy as possible with the most degree of safety in case of disasters like hard drive failure.

I take tones of notes all the time.  I have ten thousand of emails that I want to keep, on my personal email. I have thousands of useful information on my work email, which is not work related. I have .txt notes on all my computers, I have hundreds of favorites. Etc, etc.

Introducing, 21 century. Internet is virtually available everywhere. The following are the solutions I found for the aforementioned issues :

1. Favorite websites : Google Bookmars

2. Text notes : Google Notebook

3. All types of notes - the most powerful software I saw of this type: Evernote. I would really suggest giving this software a try. It will blow your mind.

4. Email: gmail with smtp and pop access.

5. Large data storage: external hard drive. I have a slim yet powerful Western Digital Passport, very easy to carry everywhere I go on trips. You may buy also a 1 TB or bigger external hard drive to keep in your house, for storage of important files as photos. On most of these devices you can store data on RAID, meaning that you can take more precaution measures.

6. Remote computer access : Windows Remote Desktop connection and virtual private netowork. A very easy to set and use vpn software is Hamachi . This way you can access any of your computers from everywhere, as long as you can also control your firewall( it may be possible that you will not be able to create a vpn with your work computer, for obvious reasons).

The beauty with Google is that you use your google id for all their products. And they have so many quality products, it never ceases to amaze me.

No more annoying alarm bell ! That puts you in a bad mood from the start of day. It’s time to have a nice song for waking up!
Here’s how.

2008 UPDATE: I just realize that today you can simply copy your favorite song to your mobile phone and assign it to the alarm. But, let’s say that you don’t like the sound quality from your mobile phone and preffer to wake up with sound from your sound system. That way, the below is still valid

We assume that you have:
1. a desktop computer - or
2. a laptop - or
3. wireless speakers
in your room.

STEP 1. Go to Start -> Control Panel.

STEP 2.

If on your computer this does not appear, than most probably this is the way the control panel appears:

Choose “Performance and Maintenance”. 

 STEP 3. Click “Add Scheduled Task”

STEP 4.

STEP 5. Select “Winamp” from the list of installed programs

STEP 6. Choose a name for the task

STEP 7. 

STEP 8. Enter user name & password you use when logging into Windows

STEP 9.

STEP 10.

STEP 11. I recommend using this configuration:

STEP 12. Install the winamp startup plugin from here .

You are now finished. Make sure that the song that you desire to wake up is the first in the most recently used winamp playlist.

If you experience any problems, just leave a comment on this page and you’ll get a solution.

Enjoy.

… has helped me. To me, an ice cream or a juicy pork steak are just not interesting. Or a cigarette( is that food?).

This is a habit I developed and cultivated in time. Reading information from various places and trying it. And sticking to it, no matter the temptations or other’s opinions.

Many years ago I was paying several visits a year to different cardiologists. I was suspect of a heart disease and doctors were contradicting each other. In the last five years all doctors said the same thing: “You are perfectly healthy“. The last doctor I saw, for a routine check, told me “I don’t know what you’re doing, but it must be really good. You have the heart beat of a professional athlete“. His words were the perfect result of all my efforts.

I am not going to say what food to eat. I encourage you to search for yourself what suits you best. Stay away from instant gratification advertisement. You are not going to get healthy or slim in a week. Not even a month. It’s not going to happen. You will experience frustration when all the others are “enojoying their life” and eating whatever comes their way. Stick to it. Five years from now you will have a slick smile on your healthy face, while they will have a big belly and a fat ass.

Eating healthy food is one of the keys of living long and happy. There are others - like exercising regularly. Another crucial one is having a healthy social life.

Check out the other articles also from this section.

Watch Fight Club (Widescreen Edition) . It will hit you like a slap on the face. An eye-opening one.

I am a fan of Wordpress. It’s just too cool to have access to all the themes and plugins that a whole community is developing. I can completely change the appearance of my website with just a few clicks.

There has to be a bad part and there really is one in Wordpress’s case. By assembling modules written by various people around the world, you are taking a risk. Many modules are not properly tested, especially for interconnect scenarios. Activating a plugin or a theme can cause another to stop working properly. It happened to me with wp_polls plugin. After I activated the Mollio theme, this plugin was not printing correct anymore.

Lately I have  the feeling that I have to start looking into the code. And learn more about PHP and other web technologies. This is because I care of the usability of this website. I care if some hacker or robot steals or modifies some of my content.

First step that I did - I installed a plugin which can be scheduled to backup the db and email the resulted sql file. Maintaining a copy of the articles is very important, but is not all. I have to backup all my configurations of plugins and other files. This is not saved in any db.

Probably in some time I will learn enough PHP to start developing my own plugins with MY standards of quality. In the meantime, I am very grateful to all the people that worked on developing the plugins that I currently use. Thanks guys!

You could say that I am an open minded man. I respect other people’s decisions, without questioning them. But I also have personal boundaries.

Over time, several gay men showed interest in me. As much as I respect their choice of fucking other men, this really disgusts me. And when they look at me with a sexual look I feel like throwing up.

Couple of days ago a waiter was taking the order of a girl in my group. I went closer to them, wanting to order also. When he saw me, his jaw dropped, with a salivating look on his suddenly enlightened face. He literally ignored the girl that he was taking her order and came to take my order. At first I was happy that he took my order fast, as I was really hungry. Then, over the next few hours I spent in that place, it became disgusting. I was trying to order from other waiters, but everytime he came to me, smiling and with a flirty look. brrr. Everytime I was going to the toilet he was checking me out.

Other guys checking me out. hmm…

There are also good parts( ?!) of this - there is this club where I get free drinks from the bartender. He is also gay.

Fat women wanted me for as long as I can remember. Some grab my ass, others grind on me. This also disgusts me, but it’s much more bearable.

UPDATE: The son of my 80 year old neighbor offered to take me on a trip and show me around( he is a local, while I am not). This happened 3 months ago, when I first met him. I remember being excited at that time, he seemed a very interesting man. In the meantime we both have been busy traveling and working. Today I met him again, we talked for 15 minutes. After couple of minutes I started getting suspicious: he was too friendly. Or maybe he really is just being friendly. HMM. I don’t like this. How can you ask a 45 years old man if he is gay? This is a delicate situation, but I’m not going on his 4×4 until I’m sure he’s straight…

I own this memory card for 3 months now. Didn’t had any problems. I have never experienced delays in writing data to it. I use it on a Canon SD 850, with pretty high resolution and large file sizes.

The only incovenience I had was that when I had a 500 MB video I had to install specific Canon software. The automatic “Windows scanner & camera wizard” was not able do download it. But this may be related more to my canon camera than to the memory card. However, after installing Canon’s software for my camera , I was able to download the file.

I am very satisfied with my card. I saw on other Canon cameras, with other cards, significant delay for writing even a single picture to card. This would be unacceptable for me. That is why I am happy for this quality Kingston product.

The Kingston memory card is constructed with the new SDHC technology. There is no risk that cameras built in the next 5 years will not be compatible to it.

Yesterday I set up my gmail account in Outlook. I desperately needed to arrange emails by size, as I was at 93% of the 2.8 GB allowed. If you’re new to gmail, yes, they don’t have this option - arranging emails by size.

I managed to clean 1 GB of space by deleting about 150 of the largest and currently unuseful emails. Altough this made me happy, I didn’t like the lack of synchronization between Outlook and Gmail - when I read a message in one account it was still showing unread in the other.

No problem, it’s enough for now, let’s just delete the account from Outlook and clear 2 GB of space from my hard drive. Easy task. First thing that I did - I went to “Tools->Email accounts” and I removed my account from the accounts list. Now the list was empty. However, the emails were still there.

After spending 15 frustrating minutes searching on the web for this basic information, I decided to write an article about it, so others won’t have to waste their time. Or will they? Read on.

So, how do you delete an email account from Outlook? The answer I was finding everywhere was: “Go to Tools->E-mail Accounts->Email->View or change existing email accounts->select account-> click Remove“.

Well, it’s not that easy! This only deletes the entry from that list. The email account remains configured in Outlook. This means that all the emails are still on your computer and that Outlook will keep connecting to that email account.

I then tried ”File->Data File Management->select Personal Folders->click Remove” as I saw that this was pointing to the file containing all my email( judging from it’s size). Again, it’s not that easy, Outlook demands to set another email account as the default email account before attemting to clean the previous one.

I turned to Outlook online help. This lead me to where I started, plus some other nonsense results.

Then I went back to “Email accounts” menu and added a new email account, with valid information. After the set up was complete - surprise - I was not able to set it as default.

Then I closed MS Outlook and deleted the “Outlook.pst” file. Bad choice! When I started Outlook again, it complained that it cannot find the Outlook.pst file and exited. I created a bland Outlook.pst. But our friend MS Outlook is not that stupid! It again complained and exited.

In the end I uninstalled Outlook. I just wasted 30 minutes of my life.

Probably the thing was that the gmail account was the only account in my email accounts list. And when I deleted it Outlook went crazy. No matter how many email accounts I added after, the “Set Default” button remained disabled.

Good job!