Crafty: Make your Own Wine Stem Markers

There’s a great post over at Curbly on how to make your own wine stem marker. If you’re a craft person and often to go or have parties where wine glasses are involved, this may be something you will find interesting.

How To: Be As Happy As Your Dog

Ian McKenzie has a great post over at his site about how to learn from the simple wisdom of your dog for a happier life.  There are some really great nuggets of truth and wisdom here.  I plan on using many of these while I am enjoying my much needed vacation next week.

Effective Time Saver Series, Part 2

OK, this one is not going to be new to anyone, really, but I think it is still one that is overlooked.  If you want to save yourself 5-10 minutes every morning, lay out what you are going to wear the night before.  This works for a couple of reasons:

1. If you decide the night before what you are going to wear you save the time of making that decision first thing in the morning while you may not be in the best frame of mind to be making decisions.
2. By laying out what you want to wear ahead of time you save yourself from making the realization at noon that you are wearing one black sock and one blue sock.

I know this is a very small thing, but you can really get your life organized by tweaking just the small things.

Effective Time Saver Series, Part 1

In the two jobs I worked at before my current job I worked close enough to home that I could go home everyday for lunch. Besides being a great way to get away from work and relax, it was also a great time saver for me. The reason this is true is because I love television. I could sit and watch from sunrise to sunset if given the opportunity. However, with a job, a wife, and a young child I don’t really get that opportunity very often, so I need to maximize the time I do get. That’s where my beloved VCR (no, I don’t have TiVo, yet) comes into play.

Here’s what I did. Whenever something was coming on that I really wanted to watch without interuption, or was in the same time slot as something my wife wanted to watch, I simply taped it. Then, when I went home for lunch, I just watched the show I taped, fast-forwarding through the commercials. I could usually watch an hour show in about 35 to 40 minutes. Saving me time and arguments with my wife about what to watch if our shows were in competition.

You might be asking, how does this help me save time? Well, imagine you really like TV, but you are really busy. If you have a show that comes on at 7pm and 8pm but you are too busy to watch, simply tape them and take care of the other business you have. After that, you can watch your taped programs without the commercials in less time that if you had stopped what you were doing and watched the shows. Let’s face it, there’s no way to be productive during commercials.

Getting Things Done (GTD) and ADD

Although I probably would have never thought of this myself, it seems a natural match:  ADD and GTD.  Meg Edwards, a coach at The David Allen Company, her article makes a pretty good case that GTD would be a great way of helping the child/adult struggling with ADD to stay organized and on task.  Let’s face it; don’t we all suffer from this just a little?

A Quick Afternoon Pick-Me-Up

I discovered a great afternoon pick-me-up recently that I felt I should share. If you’re like me you often get that mid-afternoon slump where you feel just a little less motivated than normal. Maybe you have a meeting to lead or a presentation to make in the afternoon and you feel less than confident or have a lack of “gusto”. Well, I have found that doing a quick tidying up does a world of good for me.

Let me explain. One recent afternoon, about 2:30 or 3:00 I was finishing up completing the last stage of my caffeine processing when, standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom I noticed how out-of-whack my shirt was. Naturally, not wanting to look like a slob, I completely un-tucked my shirt, tucked it in nice and neat. It was then that I noticed one of my shoes was coming untied, so I bent down and retied tied it. Of course, you can’t just tie one shoe because then one is tight and one is loose, so I tied the other. Suddenly, with my freshly-tucked shirt and tightly tied shoes, I had a new burst of energy and confidence. I’m not 100% sure why this works, but I have tried it several times since then and it hasn’t failed me yet.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Freeware PC: Antivirus

OK, so you have your PC up-and-running and now you need to protect it from the viruses that you have to come to expect in email and on the internet. Well, I have tried a couple of different free antiviruses, but my favorite has to be AVG Free. Currently in version 7.5, AVG Free, is a full-featured, yet easy-to-use program.

Beginning with an easy to use console, you will find that AVG Free gives you the ability to do not only full system scans, but also scans of selected files, folders, or entire drives. Also, once installed, you can simply right click on a file and select the “Scan with AVG Free” option and scan your newly downloaded files to ensure that they are safe to open and run.

AVG Free also allows for automatic updating and scheduled scanning, making very easy to keep up-to-date on the latest threats, knowing that you will be protected.

Last, but not least, AVG also allows for real-time protection. So, if you are downloading programs, music, movies, etc. from web sites that are off the beaten path, AVG will catch any of the downloads that have viruses in them.

Overall, AVG Free is a great product that is easy to find, easy to use, and actually works as good as it says it will. If you don’t already have an antivirus running, hurry up and get AVG Free and make sure that you are protected.

How To: Remember Names After Meetings

If you work for a company that has lots of meetings with lots of different people and have the same trouble remembering names as I do, I have a great tip for you. Over at his blog, Gurno.com, Adam Gurno has posted a great tool for remembering those names. I used to use this at a previous job when I had meetings with people that I didn’t often interact with. It works really well and is very simple. Basically, the idea is to draw a rough map of the meeting area and map out where each person is sitting. This way you can have a mental image of which face was where and a hard copy of each name in each position to go with it. That way when you see one of your meeting participants again you have a better shot at remembering their name.

I used to employ this method my simply drawing the table and participants either at the top of my paper or in the margin. I would suggest being subtle about this and let everyone believe that you’re just really good with names and faces.

Adam expands on the basics of this method with some very good ideas, so it’s definitely worth checking out.

The Freeware PC

OK, so I’m a geek. I admit it. Heck, I wear it like a badge of honor. With that said, I don’t have the money to purchase all of the software to do all of the fun things I want to do with the little free time that I have to play around on my home PC. So, as so many do I turned to alternate (cough peer-to-peer cough) sources of software. I was able to locate and install just about any software that I wanted. However, things like viruses, spy-ware, and subscriptions became a bit of a hassle.

Search, download, install, curse the lack of working serials, uninstall, search some more.

It was such a frustrating circle that I have decided to exit the loop. No more searching for the latest, greatest software in the backrooms of the internet hoping I didn’t get busted for pirating. I’ve decided to go legit. What I have decided to do is to create a fully-functioning PC that runs only cost-free, spy-ware-free, virus-free software. The only exception to this rule being the operating system. I don’t really have the time or desire to become proficient enough in Linux to replace my home PC. At least not yet.

Along with the search for the best freeware tools I am going to blog each step of the way. I hope to have a good review of each product I decide to include in the mix along with the links so that you can download it yourself. At the same time, I hope that you will suggest some tools that I may not have run across on my own.

Well, happy reading and I look forward to your comments.