New Year’s Resolution: No more mystery chargers

December 10, 2008

OK, so sometimes I’m slow. I’ve had an excellent Brother label make(the linked one at home, and an older one at work) for a looong time now. I started using one in 2002 when I first drank the Getting Things Done elixir, I believe. And I’ve had a ridiculous number of chargers and power adapters for even longer.

But it just dawned on me that I can actually use my label maker to mark my power adapters so I don’t:

throw one away because I don’t know what it’s for (yes, I’ve done that);
unplug the wrong one while crawling around under the desk (yes, I’ve done that);
accidentally bring the wrong charger with me on a trip (and I’ve done that once, as well).

So from this point forward, one of my resolutions is to label my power adapters when I first acquire them.

Learning the hard way is still learning…

Taskwriter is a cool tool for GTD

December 8, 2008

I’ve just started trying out Taskwriter, which is an online tool designed to help you with Getting Things Done (GTD). As you might expect from a GTD-oriented tool, Taskwriter understands the notion of Next Actions, Contexts, Projects, etc.

I’ve included only a couple of tasks on this screen grab, but Taskwriter’s UI makes it easy to filter, print, and manage lots of items through the selection boxes on the left side of the screen. This makes it easier to take the distractions of irrelevant contexts out of your view, for example.

Another thing that is pretty cool is the Calendar view they provide – anything that has a due date on it will show up on the calendar. This helped me recognize, for example, that I had too many things due this Friday so I renegotiated a few to push them out.

Wish list

As you may know from some of my other posts, I often have a hard time with online-only tools because I spend a lot of time without connectivity. I can work around this by printing lists, etc. with Taskwriter, but wish it had some integration with Outlook, Google, etc. One workaround might be if they had an email parser that I could send tasks to and have them show up on my Taskwriter dashboard.

With that in mind, I will be making some requests / suggestions for future enhancements to see what happens. Based on what I’ve seen at the Taskwriter blog, I stand a pretty good chance of seeing my suggestions show up someday.

Give it a try

If you want to give Taskwriter a whirl, you can set up a free account from their homepage, or use it as a guest (obviously, this won’t save what you enter, but you can try all aspects of the product without providing any contact info).

Keep an eye on these folks – I like what they’ve done so far.

Ever been in the doghouse?

December 4, 2008

Someone sent me a hilarious “viral video” about being in the doghouse. Yes, it’s an ad (of sorts) but you don’t see anything commercial until the last 5 seconds or so.

The production quality and humor of this piece are great, so I expect lots of people to send it around. You don’t have to go far – just watch it below (or use this link if you’re not reading this in a browser).

I love this kind of advertising.

“I just saved a bundle on my data insurance…”

December 3, 2008

Good news - I just got word about some discount codes for Mozy for the month of December, which will save you money if you sign up for the Mozy online backup service I posted about earlier today.

To get the discount, click here to go to the Mozy site, pick what plan you want and enter the following discount code at checkout to get 10% off annual and biannual MozyHome Unlimited and MozyPro subscriptions.

The magic code is: DECEMBER.

Enjoy!

How much are you willing to lose?

December 2, 2008

One of my colleagues got some kind of malware infection on his site the other day – while distracted by a conference call he was participating in, he accidentally clicked on a bogus “window” that showed up on his screen (you may know the kind – it looks like a legitimate dialog, but is actually a web popup).

Due to the infection, he had to reformat and restore his system. He made a good backup of his Documents folders (or “My Documents” since this was Windows XP), reimaged to the company’s default configuration, and restored his data.

Bleak Outlook

When he reinitialized Outlook, it re-sychronized with the mail server and put all his messages back. Unfortunately, when he went to open up his archive folders within Outlook, they were nowhere to be found. The realization hit him: he’d just lost two years of archived email!

How did this happen? Well for some reason unbeknownst to me, Outlook doesn’t put your email archive in your Documents folder structure. Instead, Outlook puts it in a directory you never see: …\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook. If you only backup your Documents folders you never get this folder.

What can you do about it?

There are a number of things you can do to mitigate the risk of this happening to you:

Change your settings to get Outlook to put your Archives in your Documents folders.
- From your Outlook Options dialog, you can reconfigure your default AutoArchive settings to tell it to store your Archives in a folder within your Documents folder structure. I have a folder within my Documents folder called “Outlook Offline” that has all my archives in it.
  - Click the thumbnail at right to see what my Outlook configuration looks like (keep in mind that this is for Outlook 2007, running on Vista – if you’re running Windows XP, or another version of Outlook, there should be similar setting. On XP the folder you’ll look for will be …\My Documents\).
Perform Image (full-disk) backups
- I also make image backups. I use an awesome product called Acronis True Image Home 2009 that makes it a snap to do a full-disk image copy of my hard drive. It makes it easy for me to create snapshots in time of all of the setting on my system. That way, if my drive gets trashed, infected, stolen, etc. I can restore everything on my system as it was when I backed it up.
Perform automated, file-based backups
- Having lost data myself, I also have another layer in my backup strategy: automated, file-based backups using Mozy. I’ve raved about Mozy before, and will continue to do so. I use this for all of my computers (and my wife’s, and my kids, and my dad’s…etc.)
- You see, one of the weaknesses of many backup strategies is that they often rely on the user to a) remember, and b) perform backups. Mozy is an unobtrusive agent that backs up your data in the background and sends it in a secure, encrypted form to remote servers managed by storage giant EMC.
- Mozy offers integrated restore capabilities so you can initate a file restore right from your desktop. It’s a piece of cake.
- The fact that Mozy stores your data off-site means you have backups of your important stuff, even if your computer is stolen, you suffer a catastropic loss at your home, etc. (Mozy also offers a Pro version for your business, and a free version that is limited to 2Gb).