Erator's Sandbox

Last year we bought one of those pre-made Thanksgiving dinners from La Madeline because we didn't feel like cooking and their prices were great for what you got. This year we were invited by my uncle to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family in their house, so I already has discarded worrying about the dinner, but today I received an unexpected phone call from La Madeline: "Last year you ordered the Thanksgiving dinner package from us, would you like to place your order for this years now?" It took me a minute to figure out what they were talking about and to remember what we had last year, but I was pleasantly surprised that they kept my phone number and only called me to offer me the same service I had already purchase from them before. So I let them know that I was not interested because we already had plans, and they said they were doing the packages for Christmas dinner too, in case we needed it. Great service and if you want to skip the cooking, call La Madeline, th...

In this recent post at the 37signals blog, they have a great excerpt about finding one's own schedule to maximize the creativity flow. Great info, sadly not many have the ability to implement these techniques. Csikszentmihalyi: "Time is more flexible than most of us think" - (37signals)

What a great invention: He said: "Something had to be done. It took me a little while and some very frustrating prototypes but eventually I did it." Conventional filters can cut out bacteria measuring more than 200 nanometres but not viruses, which typically are 25 nanometres long. Mr Pritchard's bottle can clean up any water - including faecal matter - using a filter that cuts out anything longer than 15 nanometres, which means that viruses can be filtered out without the use of chemicals. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/12/nwater112.xml Now if only they could make something similar for adware infested software...

In case you missed it, like I did, Merlin Mann has an excellent Google Tech Talk presentation about managing your emails: Inbox Zero . Watch his presentation and grab the slides in PDF format from the site. I'm personally going to try this, although it might be hard with my current Inbox count being 2,177 items.

Some days, it's easy to get into the work I have laid out in front of me. I think of it as interesting or worthwhile and I finish it as fast as I possibly can. Other days, I have a really hard time getting started. I know I have a pile of work to do, and that it's not going away, but unconsciously I find myself distracted away, looking for a new subject of interest online, or getting caught in the "Option Loop." The loop is simply thinking about all the options, but getting stuck not starting or finishing any of them. It's almost like a mental deadlock. Most of the times I am able to regain focus and productivity by: Getting a cup of coffee or a high-caffeine soda Turning on the lights Adjusting my chair Walking around a little bit Talking to someone else about my projects Unfortunately, there are times when none of the above works. The biggest problem is I know the best time to start is now , so I have no excuses. How do you get into your work when you'r...

Cheat in a good way! What if you could have a quick reference for some of the more obscure properties of CSS or a Regular Expression assertion? Yeah, sometimes you just can't remember what property you're supposed to use to show the text font with a hot-pink background. What if you could have a *gasp* Cheat Sheet!? You can! Dave Child has an excellent website where he has created cheat sheets for the most popular web programming languages, MicroFormats, and even World of Warcraft! Do yourself a favor and checkout ILoveJackDaniels.com's Cheat Sheets.