Archive for June, 2009
The boy has skills
June 21st, 2009Time is not on my side
June 17th, 2009These days I find myself juggling with a lot things to do; both professionally and personally. The problem is that I don’t have very good coordination skills, which makes juggling quite a challenge. Struggle is the word coming to my mind.
It’s not that I’ve gotten bad at time management — I was never good at it — but nowadays I have many more things to take care of. It is the most obvious at work. Back in October last year I was promoted to a management position which meant that the number of projects I have had to keep an eye on increased at least 2-fold. Combined with a busier private life, my brain quickly gave up trying to keep up with everything going on.
Back in my student years I didn’t have such problem. Life seemed much slower and maybe simpler. Not to mention I was younger.
So what I should I do (I hear you ask)? Well, if my memory can’t hold all this information I need to give it some help. At first I tried making ToDo lists on paper at the beginning of every week. Unfortunately the list kept getting longer and messier as the week went by. Plus, I had to recopy my ever growing list every Monday. I quickly realised it wasn’t a practical solution. The more logical approach (especially given that I’m in the software business) was to use a software to help me keep track of my tasks.
Being a Mac enthusiast I stumbled upon a tool called OmniFocus from The Omin Group. It is build around the GTD approach. I’ve found it very simple and intuitive to use. Unfortunately my computer at work runs on Windows so it wasn’t an option. After some more research I came across My Life Organized — don’t you love the name? –. I’ve only been using it for about three weeks so far but I have certainly noticed a very substantial improvement in keeping up with all my tasks.
Time will tell if this approach is really working for me.
Night shots
June 16th, 2009Some night photos I took a while ago..
Pictures from New York
June 16th, 2009I’ve recently been to New York. Here are a few photos from the trip. I’ll upload more in the next few days.
New Look
June 16th, 2009WordPress Upgrade
June 16th, 2009I’ve been running WordPress 2.0.2 for a while now. With the site being live again I thought I’d use the opportunity to break it again. And wrong I was! I decided to upgrade WordPress to the latest version (2.8). As it turned out it was dead easy. I’ve followed the instructions here and it worked a treat. It’s nice that once in a while things just work. And I’m even more impressed because it’s all open source and it didn’t cost me a penny. So nicely done WordPress!
Internal Server Error
June 15th, 2009For quite a while my site has been down. It must have been caused by some kind of upgrade my web hosting provider has run. I’ve noticed the issue sometime ago but thought there was some maintenance on their servers so I didn’t look further. After a while though I realised something was obviously wrong with the site so I decided to dig around a bit. From the error log files I noticed the following entries
wrapper: /web/sites/…/public/blog/index.php: Script is writable by others
Quite an odd error. So as always I googled it and found some info here: http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2009/03/22/recovering-from-internal-server-errors. Following the detailed solution I’ve quickly brought back the site up. I’ve been fairly satisfied with this provider which I’ve been using for years. In fact it’s really the first time I’ve had such issue so I guess I can’t complain so much. Plus, it’s always a nice feeling to fix something.