DevYou

Yesterday was the midpoint of the year. Half of 2008 has come and gone. While the midpoint may not be as obvious a time for reflection as, say, the very end of a year, it’s still a good time to stop for a moment and assess how the year has unfolded thus far, and what your hopes and goals are for the rest.

Albert Einstein once said: “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.” I’ve only just today encountered that quote. It’s quite thought-provoking.  Do you believe that happiness is better achieved when you pursue a goal rather than a person or things? How, if at all, does that influence your mid-year reflections and your vision for the balance of the year?

Happy Holidays, DevYou readers!

It’s the holiday season again, and that means it’s time to shop for gifts for friends and family. If you’re already done with your holiday shopping, good for you! If not (like me) then you have some more work to do. If you’re having trouble thinking of gift ideas for certain people, then perhaps the Lootist will help.

To quote from their About page:

… people looking for great products can get recommendations from real-world specialists. This guidance comes in handy when you know who you’re shopping for, but not necessarily what you’re shopping for. For instance, if you’re looking for a gift for a friend who enjoys cooking, wouldn’t it be helpful to get shopping advice from a professional chef?

Sounds very useful to me! If you try Lootist and like it, let us know in the comments.

Thank you very much for reading DevYou. It’s a pleasure writing for you. For all of you in the US, have a great Thanksgiving!

DevYou is a relatively new blog, and I’ve been enjoying watching it grow. Every day, more people come to visit. Every day, more people subscribe to the feed. It’s really quite wonderful.

Today is another happy milestone day: We now have over 100 feed subscribers! Hooray! Not an enormous number, but a little milestone worth celebrating nonetheless.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all very much. Your support is invaluable and makes writing this blog a joyous part of my life. Thank you for visiting. Thank you for commenting. Thank you for all the ways you support what we’re creating here together — whether that’s by linking to the blog or simply telling a friend about it.

Looking forward to writing many more posts!

There’s nothing quite like the stressful agony of having your computer die, especially when it’s the sole repository of your important work or valuable files. Usually, it only takes one computer disaster to teach people how essential it is to maintain good backups, but why go through even that one torturous disaster unprepared? Get on the ball now — before calamity strikes!

Toward that end, I offer these two tips, both for Mac OS X users:

1. Clone Your Mac — Lifehacker has an excellent guide to making a bootable clone of your Mac. By following its advice, you’ll be able to boot from an external FireWire drive with all your data, settings, and applications ready to go should your Mac ever kick the bucket. Mirror Your Mac on a Bootable External Drive

2. Educate Yourself — Joe Kissel’s Take Control of Mac OS X Backups is essential reading. Says the blurb on the TakeControl website: “In the best-selling Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, backup expert Joe Kissell gives you the straightforward advice you need to go beyond the false security of copying a few files to CD. You’ll find an at-a-glance comparison of different backup strategies (low-cost, easy, safest) for backing up and restoring data, including digital photos and video projects. You’ll learn the pros and cons of each type of backup media, including hard disk, recordable disc, tape, and more; discover how to pick the best backup software for your needs; and find time-tested recommendations for setting up, testing, and maintaining backups, complete with instructions on how to restore after a crash. Important lessons you’ll learn along the way include the utility of having both a duplicate and an archive, the necessity of testing backups, and the role of offsite backups. Includes over 20 pages of step-by-step directions for Retrospect!” Take Control of Mac OS X Backups

Earlier this year, my luggage was horrifically mangled by the luggage transport machinery at the airport in Oakland, California. I was so in awe of the extent of the mutilation that I had to take a bunch of pictures of it. Up until the machine ripped it to shreds, this had been a fairly high quality REI travel bag, made of sturdy materials. Note how the strong fabric is torn, mangled and burned. Note also the metal strut that juts out of the side of the bag like a broken bone. In the close-up, you can see how intense the forces were in the machine by the way the end is ground down. Totally crazy! Click the thumbnails below for larger versions.

I offer these pictures because I think they’re amusing and astonishing, but there’s also a tie-in to the series of articles about cognitive distortions we’re in the midst of: An example of a Over-generalizing would be: “Bad things always happen to me!”

Very few of my friends have what they would call a dream job. Some have jobs that are pretty close to dream jobs; others have jobs they actively despise. Let’s call them nightmare jobs.

Each of these friends has a scheme in mind for getting into a work situation that more close resembles a dream job, and time will tell how much success each has in that pursuit.

For those that are actively planning their dream job strategy, the Dumb Little Man blog has a great list of tips entitled 22 Secrets to Discovering Your Dream and Living It.

One of my favorites is number 20:

Set aside time each day. You will not go anywhere if you don’t devote time to your dream. Set aside an hour (or at least 30 minutes) each day for working towards your dream. If you can do more, great, but one step at a time is all it takes. Set aside time either in the morning, or in the evening, or some time when you know you will do it every day. Make it a habit, and you will succeed.

I’m still in the midst of packing up my home in preparation for my move, and I happened to stumble upon two stupendously useful and timely tips while reading my RSS feeds. (Hooray for feeds… Again!)

Both of these tips are on Unclutterer, but I originally found a pointer to one of them on Lifehacker.

The first tip comes from the Unclutterer article Digitize Your LP Collection, or Penelope Will Leave You. I have a ton of vinyl LPs (or at least they feel like a ton when I have to move them). For the last couple of decades I’ve been storing them in some milk crates I “borrowed” from the old (now non-existent) Faletti’s in San Francisco. The article has a nice tip on digitizing LPs, but that’s not my goal at the moment. The real gem for me was a link to a supplier of excellent archival storage boxes:

If you need a solution for storage, Bags Unlimited has a great selection of boxes and sleeves sized appropriately for LPs, 45s, and 78s. I label my boxes and have the contents organized with dividers that are also labeled by artist and genre.

The second tip is to photograph and throw away sentimental stuff. Brilliant!

Over the next few weeks, I went through the contents of the bin and took digital photos of the items with my camera. I organized the photos in an iPhoto album and filled in the photo’s Notes field with information about the object’s associated memory. Then, I threw away the object without any guilt or sense of loss. If I want a trip down memory lane, now I just open a file on my computer.

Both of these tips are excellent examples of how blogs can supply tremendously useful information. One need only find the right bogs. Unclutterer is obviously one of them!

The next time I move, I’m going to assemble an army of robot monkeys. Yes… gleaming-eyed, nimble, strong, and intelligent robot monkeys. Hundreds of them. And with mind-boggling efficiency, they shall pack all my belongings, move them to my new home on their backs like an army of ants carrying food back to their nest, and then unpack and arrange everything exactly as I like it. Hmm… yes… army of robot monkeys…

But, alas, I look around my half-packed apartment and I see no helpful, industrious robots. No — just many packing boxes. Well, even if I don’t have an army of robots, I do have an abundance of great moving advice from around the Internet!

• 7 Key Moving Tips (30 Something Fabulous!)
• 25 Tips and Tricks for an Organized Move
• Packing Tips (themovingplanner.com)
• Smart moving tips (movingcompanyreview.com)
• FlyLady’s Moving Tips (flylady.net)
• 6 Moving Tips to Keep Your Dog Happy Part 1 (dog-breed-show.com)
• 12 Terrific Moving Tips (about.com)
• Moving Planning (justmoving.org)
• Moving Checklist (moving-company-guide.com)

Update: Hm. I just noticed I had that robo-dolphin thing in Friday’s (re)-post. Clearly I should never be allowed to actually build robots.  But really… robot monkeys that help you move — how great would that be!?