A friend, and co-worker, of mine wrote about how people think he’s left handed because he uses his mouse “left handed.” However, he is not left handed but rather uses the mouse as a lefty to increase productivity.
As a programmer, it’s faster for him to move his left hand from mouse to keyboard than his right.
Intrigued by this different approach, and desiring increased productivity (aside from using the keyboard for almost everything, including mouse-less browsing) I gave this a shot. While it took a while to get used to, and I’m not as proficient left handed as right, the productivity is noticeable.
As a web designer I am required to do a lot of both coding and Photoshop work. Every gain in speed from left handed mousing was nullified the moment I entered Photoshop. The detailed edits and keyboard shortcut intense environment forced me to move the mouse back and forth from left to right. What to do?!
The answer came to me in a New Egg sale: the beautiful Kensington, Four Button, Trackball mouse.
Instead of being traditional and using only one standard mouse for all computer related tasks, I would purchase this gorgeous mouse for Photoshop tasks, and utilize my standard mouse for all else (when I can’t use the keyboard). Gaining the productivity gains of left handed browsing while also having a wicked mouse for my dominant hand on the right. 100% perfect scenario.
Unfortunately, I have yet to purchase the $100 mouse but am planning to in the near future.
If this is something else you struggle with, or are currently using two pointing devices (mice) please let us all know of your success/failure in the comments.
I don’t know how it happened, but the end of the article I wrote about my desire to eradicate billboards evolved into my thoughts on ad blocking.
However, Web Ware’s post definitely put a different spin on it than the Web Worker Daily post in my article.
Web Ware actually said, “a few things are clear: Users of advertisement-skipping technology are essentially engaged in theft of resources… so while the ad-skipping may be immoral, it certainly isn’t illegal.”
Immoral? Very interesting.
Interpret interesting, as “freaking weird.”
While I do not have advertisements on my blog, if I did ad blocking would not anger me. While a few tech-savy people might tire of ads and block them, the majority of internet browsers will not. Also, the content on a blog is the real reason for it to exist. People reading the content I publish is the end goal, not the money from ads.
Whatever the case, I see no “immoral” action in stopping something from appearing on a personal computer screen. After all, it’s their machine.
For future reference, if ads do ever appear on this blog, feel free to block them at your leisure. FireFox extension Stylish is a great way to do so, not to mention the countless add-ons for ad-blocking exclusively. Stylish also allows you to modify pages in other ways.
As a staunch minimalist, I cannot help but be appalled by the state of most American’s garages. With no statistics to back this up, I would say most Americans own at least a one car garage, if not a two, and the majority of those cannot get a single car inside. Unfortunately, my house is the same way. I’m working on building a bike rack complete with pulleys to raise my wife’s and my bike off the floor and out of the way.
The first, and best, way to organize your garage would be to get rid of anything you don’t absolutely have to keep. Personally, old mattresses, 10 CRT monitors, an old piece of furniture, some landscaping pipe, and more are cluttering our garage. The mattress is getting thrown away, the monitors are getting sold or donated, and the piece of furniture is supposed to return to its original owner.
But what do you do with all the stuff that’s left over? Gardening tools? Regular tools (wrenches, screwdrivers, drills, etc…)? Kids toys? The things which really do belong in a garage, but are still cluttering up the place.
My first approach is to get a small out building for things like my lawn mower, the landscaping supplies, etc…
However, some garage cabinets might also be a nice way to go.
Whatever you do, start by pitching all the crap you’ve got. Then organize the remaining non-crap into whatever will clean the place up the best, and make you the happiest with your garage. With winter coming up, you (and I) are going to really enjoy having your car in that garage you’ve been unable to use for years.
Rest assured you’ll be satisfied with a cleaner garage, and that you won’t be scraping off your windows like everyone else who can’t fit their car in their garage!
I posted about The City That Said No To Advertising previously in my post titled “A Clean City – Devoid of all Advertising.”
Recently I’ve been focusing on decreasing advertising in my life. A personal goal has been to avoid retail purchases at all costs, where possible. In addition to my eschewing retail stores, I’ve shunned television. Watching a television show now consists of downloading it or getting the DVD.
However, I am unable to avoid billboards wherever I go. Billboards are a blight on the landscape, much like the highway. What can be done about these monolithic advertisement mediums?
More importantly, billboards are becoming more and more similar to television and web ads. My vehicle cannot have anti-popup billboard software installed. Can it? With the creation of billboards sporting digital displays these ads are increasingly invasive.
An article on Web Worker Daily titled Ad Blocking: A Market or a Moral Issue? peaked my interest. Especially the sentence “this is not a moral or ethical issue: it is an economic one.” Author Anne Zelenka goes on to explain if advertisements no longer existed, a new business model would have to be created. This also applies to the abolishment of billboards.
Personally, I block advertisements using the FireFox extension Stylish. However, I only block ads on my favorite site LifeHacker as a few of the ads are inappropriate for my workplace.
Regardless, there is no avoiding billboards, and other outdoor, advertisements. I applaud Sao Paul for abolishing their outdoor ads.
Web Worker Daily posted a guide on How to Get Through a Paper and Digital Backlog.
Paper stands as the root of all evil and clutter for me, so I avoid it at all costs. However, Web Worker Daily’s guide can also be applied to something near and dear to most of our hearts, RSS Feeds.
Stage 1 – Triage
During Stage 1, your job is Triage. Define what you could not stand to miss. The best way for me to evaluate this step would be to imagine myself pressing the “Mark All As Read” button. After hypothetically doing so, what would hurt me the most that I might have missed. (Quick answer, Lifehacker.com!)
Now, go to the specific feeds you must read. Take your time and enjoy reading through these special items. After this, it’s time to tackle the rest.
Note: What if they are all special to me? Then just skip to Step 2.
Stage 2 – Make Procrastination Productive
Recently I had to wade through 500 starred items in my Google Reader. I was dreading it. Using advice from a recent blog post I read which talked about making your procrastination productive I did my sorting, unstarring, and tagging when I did not want to be working on something else.
When I got bored working on my starred items list, I just stopped. Then when I wanted to procrastinate on my main tasks again, I started de-starring and tagging. I went from 500 starred items to less than 200 and tagged every single one in less than and hour painlessly!
You’ve read your most important feeds.
You’re ready to start wading into the seemingly endless pool.
It’s not as bad as you think, this will be over in no time!
Note: You might consider weeding out what is not the most important to you and limit your RSS feeds. Previously I had over 110 feeds and I’m “down” to 50, and working to eliminate more…
Stage 3 – Work Through the Rest
You can do this and it won’t take that long. Don’t give in and press “Mark All as Read.”
In your feed reader (Google Reader for me) view all your unread feed items. Be like Robert Scoble and just go item by item. Read fast by looking at only the third word in the title (learned from Timothy Ferris’ book) and don’t pause unless it interests you.
When you get bored, or your eyes tired, just stop. Only work on it when you want to, or when you are trying to avoid something else.
I put off tagging and clearing out my starred items list for months only to find that I finished it off in less than an hour.
You’ll feel better once your list is cleaned out.
Now, get ditch some of those feeds and enjoy your completed task!
This is my first post in the Ideas category after sharing how to Get Famous by Sharing All Your Ideas.
I present to you, my idea for a website which is the exact opposite of Stumble Upon.
Looking at what most people find interesting is great, but seeing the same article highlighting on 20 blogs is not that intriguing, and it makes you realize everyone is looking at the same content.
Just like the Compensation article from that obscure BlogSpot page, good content is out there but not being looked at.
My idea would be to create a Stumble Upon site that finds, watches, and shows lesser, or never, looked at web pages.
When you would Anti-Stumble, the sites you visit would be seldom seen, have few links coming to them, and might not post very often, but should have some good content. How would this crawler find good content? I’m not sure, it’s just an idea right now.
However, my reasoning for something like this is that Stumble Upon, Digg, del.icio.us, and the 80,000 other social bookmarking sites allow you to find what everyone else has already found.
Anti-Stumble Upon would allow you to find what no one else has, like an early day explorer! And who doesn’t like finding buried treasure.
Regardless, this is one of many ideas I’ve had, which I know I cannot act upon or create so here I am crowdsourcing it.
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” – George Bernard Shaw
The big G. B. W. has a ton of great quotes. The one above is a favorite of mine.
Striving to simplify and minimize my life has lead me to the realization that I have far too many ideas to ever act on all of them. Completing even a fraction of the projects my imagination churns out on a daily basis would be impossible.
However, through Crowdsourcing and following Shaw’s quote might lead to greater accomplishments than what my imagination has conceptualized.
My goal follows along with David Allen’s GTD idea of offloading stuff we cannot think about. I will be offloading the plethora of ideas permeating my conscious using this blog.
Daily ideas assault me for money making websites, design ideas, productivity processes, software development, architecture, home design, and so much more.
Any of these which I cannot immediately act upon, or do not have a plan to develop later, will be shared here.
Any other bloggers who would be interested in this, or that have ideas I should read about, leave a comment and I will read your post and be happy to give a link if interesting enough.
Thank You!
Website Magazine just published that “The House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved H.R. 3678 which extended the ban on Internet access taxes.”
Unfortunately, the bill has to go through the House, but hopefully it will see the same success it did in the HJC.
Just say NO to internet taxation!
Dumb Little Man introduced me to the Keyboard Germ Analyzer from JustSayHi.com
A little research revlead JustSayHi to be an online dating site, but it has a great section of “cool stuff to stick on your blog.”
You can embed the Keyboard Germ Analyzer along with:
Enjoy!
It’s true. As you might notice in your feed reader of choice, or the location bar in your browser of choice: the URL you’re currently at is NOT http://blog.erbtech.com/.
You should now see http://www.ellisbenus.com
The author of the blog you’re currently reading! :]
Unfortunately, ERBTech.com was not my first choice for a domain name. Since I’m growing my web design business and this blog I wanted the best domain name possible. Recently I purchased EllisBenus.com for better branding purposes, so here we are today.
The blog is still the same, and old links will resolve to the new address without interruption. You will not even have to change your RSS feed if you don’t want too. However, I now sport a new, fancy FeedBurner feed.
Heck No! The site your on right now is no longer on the same hosting plan, switched from StartLogic to Site5 (way better!), the domain name is not in the same place (same move), and the feed has changed, but I told you that already.
You’ve heard it a thousand times, or more. Blogging is a labor of love. Well, my love outgrew my old hosting (as did my web design business) and my desire to upgrade put me where I am today.
I’ve been wanting to write about this for some time now, but put it off until I got the blog moved to its new hosting and domain name.
Something brought you to this blog, and I want to keep bringing you back. What you will gain from my accomplishing these goals is an in depth series of posts telling you exactly how I did it, and how you can do it too.
There are tons of people telling how you should run your blog, unfortunately, few of them tell you how they’ve done it up to that point. I am to rectify that ommision.
As always, feedback is wanted so please post in the comments!
If you are interested in guest posting please email me at eb@ellisbenus.com.