Productivity
Been working for 2 weeks now after my parental leave and it has not been pleasant to a variety of reasons. If we exclude factors out of my direct control and focus on what I actyllay do (or should) control. The pomodoro technique was a real struggle. I’m all behind the theory, I was pshyced and motivated. But I just could not get those 25 minutes to work for me. There where a lot of interruptions, both externa and internal. So what do you do in this day and age when you got a problem? You tweet about it! So...
I’ve stopped with the monthly updates due to some non-encouraging feedback. However, half-time is big so here’s the half-time update. Spend time with daughter – on track, not much to say. Loose Weight – Also on track. I’ve been down at 90 kg and now I’m leveling out at 91-92 kg which seems to be a good weight for me. I can run without my knees hurting. I’ve been eating using Glycemic Index, which has worked remarkably well. Two downsides: My stomach crashed after a while so I can’t eat strict GI now and it’s...
I use Polar ProTrainer 5 to track all my physical training (running, underwater rugby, crossfit and so on). I also have multiple computers and want to be able to access and sync my watch from anyone of them. When I travel in my work that becomes extra important. So here is how I solved it. IR Stick First of all I had to get a IR USB stick after upgrading my last computer to 64-bit. The only one I found that supports 64-bit was Polar’s own. Very expensive, but it works....
I’ve been playing around a little with the Pomodoro technique to see if I can increase my productivity (and effectively). For you that haven’t heard about the Pomodoro technique is a way of using an egg timer to focus you’re self in 25 minutes intervals. Read more about it at www.pomodorotechnique.com I’m by no means an expert on the Pomodoro technique, I’m just getting started. But it really appeals to me because I usually have problems focusing at one thing at the time. What’s the first thing I do when starting to get into a...
So this post has really no big point. I started out by the fact that I’m a heavy user of Tasks in Outlook, as I have eluded to earlier: http://www.nnihlen.com/blog/archive/2009/05/22/adding-outlook-tasks-fast-using-launchy-with-a-little-programming.aspx Much of my personality comes form being an athlete (and a geek) and as the mentality from that is to always improve you’re self. But that’s kinda hard if you don’t have any measurements. So on that note bundled up with a growing curiosity for for OData I sat down and came up with the following scheme. So the idea is to import the task data...
In Sweden, I don’t know why, we’re very week number centric. Questions like the ones listed below are not uncommon: - “What weeks will you have vacation” - “Can you be done by week 42?” What I have to do then is to switch into Outlook, Ctrl+2 my way to the calendar and switch to monthly view where I have week numbers enabled. As you can imagine this really upsets a productivity-geek-wannabe as me. So, Visual Studio to the rescue (as always ;)). I wrote a little application which sole purpose...
This is one that my colleague Mattias showed me. When I code SharePoint solutions I’m always to put in some diagnostics logging just so that I can turn it on and se what happens. There is (as always) a couple of options here. Write to the ULS logs, which I guess is the preferred way to do it and then use event throttling to turn it on and off. However sometimes its just a bit to much work. So, here’s the trick.
Sprinkle Trace.Writer's in your code where it makes sense. So for example i might want do put the following...
In my role as a consultant I’ve many a times been at a customer for months in a row. What happens then (at least for me) is I get a Exchange account at the customer, I have one at my employer and after a while I’m starting to get skitsofrentic. Either I run one in Outlook and the other in Outlook Web Access and forwarding meetings across to keep the calendars in sync. Another option is to have multiple mail-profiles for outlook to use. Doesn’t matter how you twist and turn it, you’ll always end up with a mess… Until...
Being home from work with a stomach bug today I was thinking on how I can be more effective in what I do. One thing that popped to mind is how often in a work day I lose track of what I’m doing just because I remember something else I have to do. When the idea pops up I go off to outlook navigate to the right place, add a task… And boom, my mind is way off track. So my thought was “how do I shorten the interruption so that it does not derail my train of thought”?...
This have been my little weekend project this weekend (ok, some Christmas preparations to).
Background
As some of you know I play underwater rugby. The communication from the Swedish Underwater Rugby Association to it’s members is mainly through the news page on their site’s news page: http://www.ssdf.se/t3.aspx?p=51459 (in Swedish). This page is only exposing HTML and does not expose an rss-feed (they should have used SharePoint). My problem is that I never remember to visit the site with regular intervals, so I miss out on stuff.
Approach
As I truly am a RSS junkie, that’s what I wanted. To be able to...
Everybody is talking about twitter, tweet this and tweeting that. And I haven’t really got the point yet. So this Saturday during a Chili cook out my friends Mårten and Johan tried to explain it to me. They did a job good enough to make me give it a try anyway. So I’m now on http://twitter.com/nippe I haven’t said a twittering word yet, I think I’m going to listen for a while first to get the gist of it. So I got an account what’s the next thing you do. See if you can find some...
A couple of weeks ago I felt that it was time to give my laptop (Dell Latitude D830) a clean install. I’ve been running Vista 64-bit on it and it has worked great. I’ve also been curious at Hyper-V and not totally satisfied with Virtual PC (the vm’s are often to slow). Said and done, I installed Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition and got on to configuring it and installing features and roles. That WS2008 is not a client OS is a given, but the amount of configuration to get it to work like one was a little...
Hi there, this post is about being a little more efficient in your everyday work. These shortcuts maybe saves me half a sec every time I use them, but I do use them literally a hundred times a day. Ctrl + E Using the Ctrl + E keyboard short cut gets you to the search box in many major applications, such as: Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox and Outlook 2007. Some examples: Outlook Internet Explorer FireFox ALT...
Every now and then I want to rename files in a folder according to a pattern. Mostly it is to hook up audio books in my iPod. Then I have to rename all the files with .m4a extension to .m4b (and don’t ask me why apple did choose this idiotic solution). This is easily done with a dos command in windows (ren *.m4a *.m4b). But when you want to change file names according to a pattern it gets trickier. I stumbled across this sometimes when I want to rename digital photos and such. Anyway, I found this utility...
I was vaccuming our appartment the other day and to make it less boring I listened to an episode of Hanselminutes podcast. Yeah I know, I got a boring life. Anyway’s in this episode Scott talked to Mel Sempat (PM at Microsoft Live) about programming Facebook apps. Turns out Mel put together a nifty little tool by the name of Outsync. I don’t know about you, but I’m a Outlook junkie. I have most part of my life there when it comes to calender, contacts, todo’s and so forth. I’m also on Facebook (who isn’t these days). So what...
There is two major updates released for Windows Vista, they will probably be rolled up into Vista Service Pack 1, but if you’re like me and always want the latest and the greatest (ok, sometimes my early adoptions been a little premature and not always great;)) on your box, go get them.
Just stumbled upon this little utility at CodePlex: Vista Battery Saver. Installed it on my laptop and it seems very promising. It can be configured to do smart things like change your power plan when you unplug the power cord and vise versa. Other things it does is to disable Aero and the Sidebar.
Live Writer just went Beta 2 and is available for download (this post is writtin in it). One of the new features is SharePoint compability. Check it out: http://writer.live.com/
This guy have pushed the envelope when it comes to using OneNote this (click once) install enables you to see all your OneNote's in a calendar view. OneNote Calendar
This is probably one of those everyone-else-but-me-alread-know-about-this kinda moments. But in Vista there is a built in snipping tool. What this tool does it helps you taking dumps of a specific portion of the screen. Not like Print Screen which only allows the whole screen or the active window to be captured.
Back when I was running XP I was a big fan of launchers, personally I really liked Colibri and Launchy. Could never decide winch one I liked best. When I upgraded to Vista a while back the built in launcher in the start menu does the trick for me. But good just got better with a nifty little addition released by Brandon Paddock called Start++.
What it does is to give you the ability to define custom commands to use in the start menu. For example "w Vista" does a search for Vista on Wikipedia.
It's easy to configure own commands...
I'm rapidly outgrowing one of my disks on which I, among other things, have my audio library. So I really want to move it to another disk only iTunes is seldom happy with that kind of move. After banging my head against the problem for a while I came up with a solution: Junction Points! I know there is some command line tool for it but I could not remember the name of it. So, cranking up live.com (yeah, that's right I work at MS so I try to use it before I hit Google and it's getting really good)...
Starting a couple of days ago Microsoft supplies a set of vhd (Virtual Hard Drives) containing MS products for download. I really like this idea, this is something we use a lot internally for demo, test and poc purposes. Check it out here.
Is a small one. My brother was out traveling so I asked him to bye this USB stick. He didn't, instead he bought this one: It's 1 GB USB 2. I'm a little disappointed I didn't get a 2 GB but still I really like it. So, what do I use it for? Well, I'm going to take this opportunity to present a few tools that make my life easier. Synchronization Yeah, I synchronize files (namely my "my documents" folder) between my laptop and the USB-stick. That's right, synchronizing NOT backing up. The big difference being I can...
When I cranked up my Outlook Web Access this morning I was met the new Exchange 2007 GUI. Haven't had time to play around with it yet but the frirst thing that caught my eye whas this:
The so much longed for serach box! Love it, I think I'm going to pass the day by searching throgh e-mails...
I've seen Scott Hanselman blogging about Foxit Reader for reading PDF's a couple of times. So when Adobe started thier shit about not wanting Microsoft to put a "Save as PDF..." button/menu option in Offie 2007, I figured it was time to try something new. I also have had problems with Acrobat Reader not closing correctly so I have to "End Task" when I close windwos... Anyway, I tried Foxit Reader and man it's fast! I didn't even have to run an installer. After using it for about a month I have only possitive things to say about it.
This summer I've been reading The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and David Thomas. And there is nothing else to do but to join the masses of appraisers. It's a really good read. The stuff these boys introduce and advocates is good. The only thing I really found my self disagreeing to was the part about writing your own domain specific compiler for the domain you're working in (I'm referring to the Domain Languages section in Chapter 2), seems to me there can be a maintenance trap there. But that's just a gut feeling and nothing empiric. To be totally honest...
Sooo, this blog been quiet far to long now. I've been on vacation and mostly disconnected. So this week has been mostly about starting working and catching up on mail, feeds etc. There has been happening a lot of stuff. For one Windows Live Writer came out in beta (this is by the way my first post using it). Looks really good so far. Has a plugin framework so I expect we'll see a lot of those in the future. Seems like Subtext 1.9 "Daedelus" was released just today! Really cool, I'm going to upgrade this weekend. Big up to...
OEM PC's usally comes with a lot of crap on them, if you (like me) don't like that, check out this tool: The PC De-Crapifier
Seems awsome!
Ever browsed around and felt that this is a page/post you want to read later. For me bookmarking doesn't really do it, I tend to forget and it drowns in a sea of other bookmarks. Well I was really happy when I found this little nifty service. I just hit a bookmarklet in my browser and the service dumps out the page and mails it to me. Sweet! And of course I've set up a rule/filter on my email client so it's drops down in to the "To Read" folder/label all by it self.