If I order a cup of coffee, usually I just drink it black. Recently, I’ve noticed that if you let a cup of coffee Starbucks sit for a few minutes before you drink it, you can see an oily film on the surface of the coffee.
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Oily film on the surface of a black Starbucks Coffee
Does anyone know what causes that? I’ve read that fresh coffee has some natural oils, and they would rise to rise to the top, as the coffee settled. Personally, I’m worried that it might be some chemicals from the cup, that are released from the hot liquid.
As you know, I’m always on the lookout for new tips and tricks to improve personal productivity. I saw an article on Hacker News, and it really hit home. The main concept is that, while technology has the power to greatly improve productivity, it also has the power to become a major distraction in our lives. This blogger’s personal solution is to set a few rules for himself.
Some of his ideas are:
- use offline tools for planning and brainstorming. Sometimes it helps to get away from your computer.
- use a dedicated computer for playing. It’s easier to tell yourself never to play games on your work computer, than to play for 15 minute and then stop. It’s really true! Seriously, how can you stop before you finish the next level… and the one after that?
- use airplane mode for your laptop and phone. All it takes is a new text message or email in your inbox, and your attention is gone. By shifting to offline mode, you force yourself to wait for your updates when you’re ready to get them.
Sometimes limiting the influence of technology over your life, actually can help you get more stuff done.
I went to college for something I never ended up using. I know lots of other people who lament the same thing to me. They studied for 4 or 5 years and an expensive university, only to graduate and begin working in a field that values them more for their intelligence, rather than their knowledge.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with going to college. It can expose you to interesting people, and interesting ideas. But I do see a few problems that are becoming more and more common.
One is that the cost of an education seems to be going through disproportional inflation – where the cost of becoming educated at a university is rising faster than the general cost of living.
Perhaps because of that, students these days have to take on more debt to pay for their education. There was an article in the New York Times about this. Since 2000, the total student debt has climbed from 200 billion, to 1 trillion!
There were two pieces of information in the article that really caught my attention. First, is that it’s not possible to discharge student loans debt in a bankruptcy. You can discharge credit card debt, medical debt, and even mortgage debt in a bankruptcy. But no matter how grim your circumstances become, you can’t get rid of your student loans debt.
Second, there was an anecdote from president Obama and his wife, talking about their student debt. They both left school with about $60,000 of student debt each. They state in the article that they weren’t able to pay off their student debt until about 8 or 9 years after being married. Based on a bit of research, it turns out they were married 1 year after he graduated from law school (1991). So, it sounds like it took them a total of 10 years to finally pay of their student loans.
Furthermore, the only reason they were able to finally pay off the student debt, was thanks to the royalties of his best selling book Dreams From My Father (which incidentally is a great read).
Another problem is that, many young people don’t really consider any option other than heading off to a university. More and more people think they need to get a university education, just to compete. It’s true – university graduates have a much higher average life time income, compared to those who don’t have higher education. It’s this thinking that leads young people to mindlessly pursue higher education, in spite of the rising costs and debt associated with it.
Some people, like Peter Thiel, one of the original founders of Paypal, have even come out and said that higher education is a bubble right now, and that the best students should skip it entirely!
There are no easy answers for this right now. In retrospect, I really enjoyed my years studying biochemistry. But if I was a high school senior right now, I’m not sure if I would follow the same path that I did back then.
Dual screen systems are definitely a great way to boost productivity. But, not too many places online sell a dual screen system – so you need to know exactly what to buy. This is an instruction guide for how to easily buy all the parts, and setup a dual screen system for about $1200.
The key is to get a system with a video card that supports dual screens.
If you wanted to order from Dell – any easy way to get this would be:
1. Select the default Dell XPS 8300 system (showing for $949 right now).
2. Click customize.
3. On the video card options, select “ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB GDDR5″, (HD 5780 is fine as well)
4. Add to cart.
5. Select a matching monitor (ST2220L – $199) and add to cart
Total comes to $1,279.98 plus shipping.
The monitors all come with the cables you need – so you don’t need to buy anything additional. When you get the shipment from Dell, just plug the two monitors into the two DVI ports on the graphics card.
Windows 7 automatically detects the two displays. Then – in the Windows 7 control panel, there’s an option to tweak your display settings for the arrangement you set. Most likely, you’ll just have them side by side.
This system will have two 21.5 inch monitors, each capable of displaying 1920×1080 screen resolution.
Wow, I had a nice time exploring Palawan a few weeks ago. I’ll be thinking of the warm weather, blue skies, and puffy clouds, when I’m back in Pittsburgh next week.
These pictures are all from Puerto Princesa. I stayed at EJ Pension house.
I’ve been a big fan of the Kindle Reader since it first came out a few years ago. Though one very obvious downside of ebooks is that, while you pay nearly the same price for an ebook, you don’t have the same rights over the ebook version that you have with a paper version.
For instance, in the past, I would sell most of my paper books after I finished reading them. For new or popular books, it’s usually possible to earn back about 1/2 the cost by selling it through the Amazon Marketplace.
Also, it wasn’t so easy to share ebooks either. I often times like to pass along books to friends, if I come across something that I think they would enjoy reading. Previously, on the Kindle, you were allowed to read a copy of your ebooks on up to 5 different Kindle devices. That provided one option of sharing books with friends, but it limited who you could share with greatly.
I was pretty happy to see that Amazon now has enabled the ability to loan Kindle books. There are still lots of restrictions involved with this – but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
Under the current scheme, you’re allowed to loan a book once, for up to 14 days. Not all books are can be lent – it appears to be ‘opt in’ for publishers. So, only books of publishers that have explicitly allowed sharing of their books, can be shared.
There are lots of project management tools floating around the world right now. From installed applications like Microsoft Project, to online favorites like Basecamp and Activecollab. I’ve tried using several of them before, but haven’t really found one that stuck. I have a feeling that I’m not the only one. Among web application development and design agencies, I know a number of people who maintain a monthly subscription to Basecamp – just because they think they ‘should’ get more organized – but end up managing most of their projects with email and Doc files.
A big problem I’ve always run into is that these tools really take some effort to maintain, to actually be useful. If a hot new project comes in, with a short deadline, it still takes email and meetings to get everyone on board with the new project, to focus their efforts onto the new project. Meanwhile, all of the existing projects of varying importance are still logged, and still continue to vie for the attention of team members.
There’s a new project management tool out that hopes to bring some order to shared team tasks lists. It’s called CoHuman.
It’s not quite as polished as Basecamp is – though it has a few interesting features to it that make it more useful for me.
1. It uses intelligence to dynamically update and prioritize team members task list to help prioritize their work across different projects. Things are very fluid when many projects are going on at the same time. For instance, as a deadline approaches, certain tasks become much more important than others.
2. It has a concept of ‘blocking’ – some tasks need to be completed before another person can complete a task. For instance, a designer needs to complete a new Photoshop template before the developer can cut it up into WordPress and upload the finished site to a server. The tasks that ‘block’ another person from being productive are weighted as a higher priority than others that are not blocking.
Here’s a video with more about it:
If you’re not totally in love with Basecamp, it might be something worth trying out. It’s free to use – and $20 per month if you want to setup more privacy restrictions around projects.
Most webmasters I know use Google Analytics to track their websites. It’s a great tool for tracking visitors, page views, and referals to a website. However, from my experience, most webmasters only use about 1/10th of the great, powerful features that are available on Google Analytics.
It varies from website to website, but on average, about 20% of visits to a website are said to make use of an internal site search engine. WordPress actually provides good internal site search engine itself. Now, wouldn’t it be interesting to know what people search for when they come to your website? With Google Analytics, it’s quite simple to set this up. Here’s how you do it.
Configure site search from your Google Analytics profile
Inside of your Google account, edit the profile of the WordPress site that you want to setup. You’ll see a subheading called ‘Site Search’. Under there, click the radio button for the option ‘Do Track Site Search’. Next, you see a required field ‘Query Parameter (required):’. In here, just type the single lowercase letter ‘s’.
This is the most important setting. For the current version of WordPress, after you’ve performed a search, you’ll see an URL in your browser address bar that looks like this:
http://catchmesleeping.com/?s=Google
The lowercase ‘s’ is the query parameter used to represent the search string on the site search.
The next setting is optional – ‘Yes, strip query parameters out of URL [?]‘. I prefer to select ‘Yes’, because it Analytics otherwise treats pages with a query string as a different page on the ‘Top Content’ report.
The default WordPress search engine does not use categories, so you can just leave ‘Do you use categories for site search?’ set to no.
After you saved this, wait about 24 hours, and you should start to see results showing up. The amount of data is quite deep and actionable. In addition to the actual keywords people are searching, and the pages that people are searching from, you’ll see some summary data like this:
Analytics site search summary data
I found an interesting video posted on GigaOm, and decided it would make a nice follow up to my previous post about avoiding multitasking.
To quickly summarize the video:
The person interviewed here is Clifford Nass, a professor from Stanford.
Here are a few more interesting tidbits from his research:
So, how can we use this knowledge to improve our personal productivity? Dr. Nass has the following suggestions:
Lately, I’ve started listening to “This American Life” on my mp3 player. It’s a weekly, hour long program on National Public Radio, hosted by Ira Glass. It’s amazing how interesting and funny these shows consistently are. I’d recommend this download to anyone. For $2.99, you can access every single episode since 1995, and on top of that, you’re supporting a high quality public radio show.
They recently published a program about million dollar ideas. The first 8 minutes segment should give you a real taste of the character of the show – about a Vietnamese bubble tea shop in Brooklyn, and the copycat competitor that it gave rise to. Have a listen here:
Links:
Million Dollar Ideas, show page
This American Life IPhone App
