by Colin on January 11, 2010
I’m not a natural runner, but I’ve gotten in the habit of jogging 2-3 miles around the track three times a week. It keeps me healthy and — once I got over the initial pain — it has become addictive.
Still, I’m no Ironman (no, not the superhero).
After a mile or two, my body wants to call it quits. I start shuffling my legs instead of taking long, efficient strides. My head sags. My feet begin flailing outward. My breathing becomes irregular and my back hunches up.
No, I’m not having a stroke — I’m just tired.
When my body is exhausted, I’ve found that I need to pay special attention to my form. Too easily, my tired body becomes a clumsy body. Clumsy movements are inefficient, and only tire me out more quickly.
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by Colin on November 24, 2009
My life changed forever the day I discovered you can center click to open and close a Firefox tab. Just center click (click the mouse scroll wheel) a link on a page to open the link in a new tab, without losing focus on the current page. And when you’re done with the tab, just center click anywhere on it to close.
It’s a minor feature, but now I wonder how I lived without it.
Yesterday, I came across a few more useful Firefox features that I’ve already incorporated into my day-to-day repertoire. These tips center on getting more out of the aptly named Awesome Bar – a much-hyped feature of Firefox 3+.
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by Colin on October 20, 2009
Need to find a good time to schedule your next meeting?
WhenIsGood.net compiled a random sample of over 100,000 responses to meeting invitations and found that event invitations are most likely to be accepted on Tuesday at 3pm.
Groups have been using WhenIsGood.net since 2007 to find meeting times that work for everyone. The meeting coordinator simply starts an event, suggests a range of times and dates, then circulates an invitation link via email. Participants indicate the best time for them, so the coordinator can make an informed scheduling decision.
In addition to confirming the optimal meeting time on Tuesdays, WhenIsGood.net anonymously sampled user data and found that the afternoon is generally freer than the morning (especially first thing in the morning).
Interestingly, they didn’t find much variation between days of the week. People are just as available on Wednesday as they are on Friday or Monday.
Funny thing is…we used to always reserve Tuesday at 3pm as our flexible meeting time, to meet about a specific subject if necessary. Of course, now we’re juggling the daily schedules of full-time students, hourly workers and distributed employees, and Tuesday at 3pm doesn’t quite cut it anymore.
What about you? Has your group found a meeting time that tends to work for everyone?
Here’s the full report from WhenIsGood.net.
by Colin on July 1, 2008
On the last leg of my bike route back home from work, I face a not-too-steep-but-very-lengthy hill. Last night, as I was huffing and puffing up the incline, a question slowly formed in my mind: Doesn’t this bike have 21 speeds?
The truth is, until yesterday, I’d never bothered to use the left shift lever, effectively taking the front derailleur entirely out of the equation and using only a third of my bike’s gears. Most of the time, when the road slopes only slightly, the middle seven gears are sufficient. So, that’s all I used. Even when I encountered more abrupt hills, I apparently decided it wasn’t worth twisting my left hand a quarter of an inch to switch the font gears.
It’s unfortunate because, as I discovered last night, it is waaay easier to climb a hill when you downshift to 4th gear. It got me thinking about other tools I’m not using to their full potential. Are there aspects of my work that can be made easier simply by more completely utilizing the tools available to me?
The first thing I thought of is the way I design logos. In the past year, I’ve tried to freshen up the logos for our products and created a new logo for the company. I do all my graphics work in Gimp, which produces bitmap images. Normally fine, but lately I’ve been thinking that our logos should be vector images. Logos tend to be used all over the place in a variety of placements, and it would be ideal if we could scale them up or down quickly without losing quality. Currently, it can be tedious creating a newly-sized logo, and we can pretty much only make them smaller without losing quality.
I’ve got a great open source vector graphics editor on my machine; just haven’t bothered to learn it yet. Maybe it’s about time I learned how to use all 21 speeds.
