Stuff I Love, Hate or both

It’s one of those things they use in restaurants to keep tabs on paper orders. I mounted it along the bottom of a white board. I got the idea from David Shea who designs cards for using this thing to track your projects. Those are the cards you see along the bottom of my white board. There are lots of cool forms for this and other productivity items you can download from his website.

FYI – the rail cost $20 from a local restaurant supply. I got the 48 inch one, there are smaller and longer ones. The whiteboard 3×4 ft size was $50 at Staples. I got the fake wood frame (not aluminum) which made it easy to attach the order rail.

White board with cards in Order Rail.

Back of Whiteboard w/ Order Rail attached.

http://rainreserve.com/how.php

I got this in spring of 2010 and a now (Nov 2010) I’m putting it up for the winter. It’s worked great.

What I Love

Works as advertised. Easy to install (if you’re reasonably handy – you need a hacksaw to cut the downspout and a drill etc). But the connectors are well done so they seal tight without access to the inside of the barrel.

• It captures water every time it rains.
• It diverts the debris to keep leaves etc. out of the system
• It stops filling the barrels when they’re full – the overflow goes back to the downspout so you don’t have any overflow around the barrels.

You do need a closed system (watertight barrels) which I found on Craig’s list for $15 each for 55 gallon blue plastic drums. They’d been used to hold cooking wine by a company that makes tomato sauce.

What I’d do differently

The higher you position your barrels relative to where your garden is, the better the flow and pressure. I might have put them on our deck instead of under it – but then I’d have to hide them because they are “industrial” looking aka ugly.

Xobni Screen Shot

Xobni from www.xobni.com is an add-on to Outlook which indexes your outlook information and organizes it by PERSON. I’m using the free version. I opens a window next to your outlook window that looks like this picture.

What I Love

It’s got a much better search engine than Outlook – easier to find emails etc. The paid version also finds calendar events and I think attachments associated with that person.

It goes out to linked-in, facebook, and who knows what else and finds that person’s picture. Somewhat creepy in a big brother kind of way, but I like it.

What I Hate

Nothing really. The only problem I have is when I try to send an email from Xobni the hyperlinks in my signature get messed up. But that’s a minor nit.

And of course I mean the software Everything.exe from VoidTools. (Windows only – sorry Mac folks).

It’s free (but I’d pay for it) and it does only one thing and does it well. It searches your hard drive very quickly for files and folders whose name contains the words you type in the search bar. You can type in partial words, words in any order and it finds them. If you know it’s a word file just include .doc in your search or .pdf or whatever.

You can sort the results by path, click on the file or directory to open it up. You can even right click to open the folder it’s in using explorer. You can even limit your search to certain drives or folder by adding [foldername] followed by \ in your search.

The only problem I have with it is when I reboot it insists on rebuilding the index and that slows me down. Otherwise it’s instantaneous.

It has actually changed the way I name files. I’m using a lot longer names now and sometimes I even include synonyms in the name so I can search later on any word that comes to mind.

All Love - No Hate

I got a Balt Ergo E. Eazy 41″ W Workstation – 82493. It’s a small desk that raises and lowers to either a sit down or stand-up position. It uses a gas piston (like a desk chair) so there’s no motor or anything.

You can see pix here but the cheapest place I found it was WalMart online. Around $450 with the casters.

I’ve read that sitting is bad for your health so I like the option to stand.

NOTE: I got the casters so it would roll. That added about 4″ to the height so it wouldn’t go low enough for me to sit comfortably. But I was able to make a modification. When you put it together, the piston fits into a metal tube. I cut a few inches off that tube with a hack saw and it works great.

My next modification will be to run the wires down through one of the legs (they are hollow) but I haven’t done that yet.

I’m running Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit on a Toshiba Satellite L305-S5941 laptop. It came with Vista (that was pure hate – no love) and I upgraded w/ an upgrade from Toshiba following their directions. Maybe some of the things I hate about Windows 7 have to do with the fact that it’s an upgrade not a clean install.

What I Love

1. The Search. You can search for programs by name. You can search for documents or commands in many different windows. So you don’t have to keep so many icons around, or remember the ways to get to stuff (like remove program or create a restore point) you can just search for it. As long as you know the names. The search works and it’s quick.
2. The Clock. Stupid I know but I like the analog clock. When clocks went digital (that’s how old I am) I noticed I often wanted to know how close it was to the hour or the half and the hand pointing at the right angle made it easier to know than to figure out 1:47 meant almost 10 minutes till.

What I Hate

1. Every time I run a program it asks if I want to allow it to make changes. YES Damnit.
2. It hangs. A lot.
3. It refuses to pass document names to some programs – often Word. I’ll click on a file from a list somewhere. The program will open but can’t find the document. I have to click on it again.

I started this blog to post stuff I love, stuff I hate and stuff I love/hate. The goal is that somebody may find it when searching on the web for this stuff.

I’m afraid most of this will be software related. But not all.