Catching Up

Just catching up on some postings.

Family
Today is our twins first birthday. We celebrated it this past weekend with family and friends. Evan started preschool today and was totally excited to go (and can't wait to go back again!). Mel and I are doing well, just glad to not be sick right now. We were passing around a cold bug for what seemed liked months but finally kicked it a few weeks ago. It's so tough watching your little ones have to deal with a nasty cold and know that there is only so much you can do to help.

Football
The Oregon State Beavers are off to a good start this season, winning their first two games (1 home, 1 away). We have an extremely tough game coming up at home against Cincinnati. In all honesty, this may be the best home game of the season. Washington may actually be a good one too, we'll have to keep an eye on how their season develops with a new head coach and defensive coach.

Technology
iPhone - I'm still using my iPhone 3G phone. If work offered me a 3GS I wouldn't pass it up, but honestly, this phone does what I need it to do.

Windows 7 - I performed a clean install of Windows 7 on my laptop at work. I prepped my machine by moving off all my content to my network drive and noting what applications I had installed, as well as hacks/tweaks I've performed on Vista. The clean install took approximately 30 minutes but I had problems trying to install Symantec Endpoint Protection. I followed the unsupported technique of installing LiveUpdate first, restarting, and then installing SEP, but towards the end of the SEP install I got a lovely Blue Screen Of Death. Upon my system restarting it BSOD'd again. I'm glad I made a Restore Point after I joined the laptop to the network, and before attempting the SEP install. I've installed most of the software I use, and copied back my documents, "downloads", and other miscellaneous files. Since I do most of my development within a Virtual PC environment, I am currently choosing not to install a local copy of Visual Studio 2008 or SQL 2005/2008. Partly due to this decision, I'm currently sitting with 90 GB of free space instead of 13 GB. I guess 20 GBs of that free space is due to me not reinstalled iTunes or coping back my iTunes library. I may try using our home pc as the main computer that I sync my iPhone with because I find it is actually quite distracting managing iTunes on my work computer at work. Convenient yes, but distracting.

Hacks/Tweaks - Here are some tweaks I performed on Vista and plan on duplicating on Windows 7:

• Remove the AM/PM on the system clock in the start bar. (If you don't know whether it's daytime or nighttime, you have other issues going on.)
• Move the start bar to the top of the screen.
• Run IconLayOut on startup. While I try not to have ANY icons on my desktop, the ones that find their way there will be displayed as 16x16 with the name to the right, instead of 32x32 with the name underneath.
• I disable the Caps Lock key. The infrequent times I do need to capitalize one or more words, holding down the Shift key while I type is actually pretty easy.
• I hide/disable the Recycle Bin. I hardly ever take a peek inside the Recycle Bin so why should it take up space on my desktop? Besides, I use Windows Explorer so often anyways that accessing the recycle bin from there make more sense to me.
• On Vista and XP I would hide the Quick Launch area on the Start bar since I started to Windows Desktop Search in XP and Vista to launch applications. For Windows 7, the traditional Quick Launch isn't there so I don't have to worry about it.
• In Internet Explorer (7 and 8) I've recently started to hide the Favorites bar as ALT+C will pop open the bookmarks section, and also not display any other toolbars that are not absolutely needed.
• Install less programs. Not really a tweak or hack but the fewer programs I have installed that I don't really use means less distraction. Case in point, Wakoopa. This is a nifty app that tracks what applications you use each day and how much time is spent in each, but instead of spending time looking at the graphs and charts trying to figure out how to be more productive, it would be more productive of me to actually WORK. Another example, I used to have Firefox installed but hardly ever used it since IE is our corporate standard and my focus is on internal development anyways. I started to use it for "personal browsing" at work (non-work email, Google Reader, etc...) but soon got distracted with the addins, themes, etc... I uninstalled it. Gone. Bye-bye. Before I knew it though, Google Chrome replaced Firefox as my non-work related browser. The concept made sense, I love how Chrome displays your most recently visited sites as large thumbnails on the home page and how minimal the UI was but after installing Windows 7, I'm starting to think that Chrome will be not be invited back.

I hope you enjoyed this update.