It’s just a simple feature but it just saves so much time, clicking on the Download all attachment link in Gmail lets you, er, download all attachment. But you get it consolidated nicely in a ZIP file. It makes life so much easier.
Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail (name too long, consider rename) does not have that feature and it is my main complaint. Last time I’ll click and download the bloody attachments one by one. I’ll have to wait, download, save, wait, download, save, wait…
Now I just forward the mail from Live Hotmail to Gmail and download the attachment through Gmail. It’s a simple yet well-thought feature. What a life saver when you have like 10 attachments!
And recently Gmail increased the email space limit to 6 GB. It now says that I am using 625 MB (10%) of your 6182 MB. And if you’re wondering how come I store 600 MB worth of emails? Oh, it’s just those mail I forward from Hotmail to Gmail so that I can download all the attachments.
Sad to say, as much as I love Gmail, I still rely quite a lot on Hotmail, especially with friends. I use Gmail for work, but all the mails my friends send me to go to my Hotmail.
I’ve grown to be more flexible already. I maintain a to-do list of the day and never plan my day like you would in an event schedule plan.
It really didn’t make sense after a while, planning things this way:
8 AM, wake up and blah blah
9 AM, start to do work on Flash
11 AM, read a nerd book
12 PM, go for lunch
…
I rarely follow them, what I plan usually turned out this way:
6 AM, somehow woke up for no reason and have nothing to do
7 AM, since I’m on track I’ll go for a bit of breakfast
8 AM, so filling now. Tries to work some Flash
9 AM, realizes it’s unproductive and try to read a nerd book
10 AM, falls asleep reading nerd book
12 PM, my brother wake me up for lunch
…
It just didn’t work out at all. These days, I have a to-do list, ranked in priority:
Finish section A for e-business assignment
Work on at least 1 question on computing assignment
Work on Flash
Read nerd book
Renew nerd book
Optional: Have breakfast
Okay, the ‘have breakfast’ part is lame but you get my point. It does kinda help me get organized and nowadays I sleep as and when I like, read as and when I like and work as and when I like. If it’s not productive, I usually go to bed. It kinda messed up my sleep cycles to a certain extends, I’m usually well and awake at 2 in the morning programming. It’s kinda bad for health I heard but things seem to get done.
And when things get done, I get happier as the result. And happier persons do get healthy right?
There is this thing my friend was telling me about liver repairs occurring between 12 to 3 AM in the morning when you’re sleeping. And once you missed it, your liver gets poorer as the days pass by. Ever heard of this? Can anybody verify this?
There are many ways of reducing spam, you can download all the plugins and start activating them. But why not just shut off comments and pings for posts that have almost no chance of people commenting anyway?
In order to reduce spam, I start disallowing comments and pings for posts before 2007 that has receive comments. Since it hasn’t got any comments for so long, it’s probably a boring or personal (not mutually exclusive of course) post so I’ll just disallow comments and pings.
SQL Statement to close comments and pings:
UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_status` = 'closed', `ping_status` = 'closed' WHERE `comment_count` = 0 AND `post_date` < "2006-12-31 00:00:00"
The above SQL statement finds all the posts before 2007 with no comments and closes all the comment and ping discussion. I hope that would minimize the amount of incoming spam per day. Use the above command at your own risk, make sure you know what you are doing. You might have named the table wp_posts differently from me.
With that SQL command, 430 of my 1663 posts have their comments and pings closed.
It's a little depressing to log in and see Akismet catch 1000s of spam per day. To date, Akismet has protected //beconfused from 142,299 spam comments. Akismet just updated their plugin too by the way.
After a week of Ubuntu, I still couldn’t get used to the fonts. I guess I just didn’t like those fonts too much. Here is how you can install the Microsoft TrueType core fonts which include the following:
Andale Mono
Arial Black
Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Comic Sans MS (Bold)
Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Impact
Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Webdings
I am using Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) to do the installation.
Open the Synaptic Package Manager. You can find that in System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager.
Search for “microsoft truetype”. You can access search through the toolbar. Alternatively, you can press CTRL + F for that.
Right click on “msttcorefonts” and you choose “Mark for installation”. You may be prompted to install “cabextract” which is a program to extract Microsoft Cabinet files. “cabextract” is required for installation of Microsoft TrueType core fonts.
Click on Apply on the toolbar. Alternatively, you can press CTRL + P.
Just finish the installation and your familiar Microsoft core fonts such as Georgia, Verdana and Trebuchet MS would be back. I prefer surfing the internet with Trebuchet MS. Hope it helps.
I have been running into troubles logging in to WordPress and was kinda frustrated all morning.
Basically each time I use tried to log in, I get:
You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.
I could not edit the blog, nothing works except the front page. I did a couple of searches at Google but the solutions didn’t seem to work for me.
In the end, I did a new installation of WordPress and scrutinized every damn thing in the users and usermeta table between a database that worked and a database that doesn’t.
Did you change the prefix of your table names in WordPress after the migration?
LiveScience ran an article on how to overcome shyness tentatively. It’s a rather interesting writeup. Here’s an abstract of what it’s about in point form:
shyness may affect up to 40 percent of the population
shy people want to be outgoing and friendly, but can’t seem to figure out how to do it, Carducci said
[shy people] may be social and have friends, but they tend to do the same things over and over again with the same small circle of people, rather than exposing themselves to new social situations.
shyness is not related to self-esteem. People can be confident in certain aspects of their livesâ??they may be able to give presentations in front of hundreds of peopleâ??but the thought of making small talk with a stranger might make them extremely anxious.
and of course – how to solve shyness tentatively:
imagining themselves in different social situations while taking slow, deep breaths to keep calm
volunteering as a good way to do this. “When you volunteer, [people] don’t really care your level of skill; they’re just after your time, so there’s no critical self-evaluation,” [Carducci] explained.
People should also realize that “they need not take all the responsibility for any failure they might encounter,” Cheek said. “Sometimes another person is unresponsive for reasons that have nothing to do with the shy person.”
I think volunteering really works. I don’t consider myself shy but I sometimes have problems talking to people about personal things. I do horrible small talk too. Well, I’m still trying.
