Gah!

Gah.

Book Recommendation

From an elementary school I drive by daily (not either of the ones attended by my children)...

Might I suggest "Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" by Lynn Truss?

If you want to go left, you have to go right.

The Sphinx: Your temper is very quick, my friend. But until you learn to master your rage...
Mr. Furious: ...your rage will become your master? That's what you were going to say. Right? Right?
The Sphinx: Not necessarily.

So... to go wireless... I plug it in?

Why @CNET is a failure. (An ALMOST Work-Related Post)

I love CNET.  I remember way back in the day when it was c|net.  I remember Netscape 1.1 slowly drawing each yellow dot of their yellow background.  I remember when it was a TV show before they had a website.   I've been a fan for a long time.  To be sure, I learn much more from <s>MS</b>NBC, news360 and all of the feeds in Google Reader, but I've still subscribed to CNET's Daily Dispatch forever.

A few weeks ago, it broke.  It stopped working on my iPhone, my iPad, Gmail, Lotus Notes, you name it.  I even tested it in Chrome, Firefox and the iPhone Safari instance.   I've tried it at work, I've tried it on my home network.  I've tried it on my wife's laptop as well.

And then I tweeted them with my findings, but to no avail.  (Not sure they're actually monitoring their Twitter account.)

They even made two changes during that time.  First, to make it break a little less hard, and then secondly, they did a redesign.  But it's still broken.

Every time I try to click on any link, it takes me to api.facebook.com/l.php  And no matter what I use, I get the same error "Not found."

Am I the last subscriber and is this a ploy to get me to unsubscribe?  I know they've tried to kill off this great newsletter before.

The newsletter:

The result:

Back to It

Once again, restarting the diet. My biggest problem is that there is always special occasions, reasons for me to break my diet. The good news is that lately, I get back to it quicker and I don't have as far to go. This time, I have 10.2 pounds to go and I feel good about that. We just wrapped up a week of vacation and we ate out a lot because we like to explore and try new places. We also walk a lot, so that was not bad.

So I'm back to tracking it all in Lose-It! and I ended the day with several hundred calories unspent. I got in two walks and got up early so got lots of exercising in, got caught up on Breaking Bad and got quite a bit of reading in (with more still to come tonight.). Also got a lot of chores in this evening, nice to be getting caught up on that stuff, including straightening up some extraneous finance stuff like account access and verifying old gift card amounts so that I can use them up.

It was a rough first day back at work, but there's still a lot of upside, but I did have to come to a realization today that some things that I thought were important aren't -- at least temporarily. Someone else will make them important again, but until then, I'm not going to worry about it. Because they know I'm not going to move until they signal that they need me to, and when they need me to, that will restart the process and they won't be able to get answers for a week or two after that. I don't like operating like that, but the other alternative makes no one happy. (Makes me think of that classic memo "The beatings will continue until morale improves." Yeah, good luck with that.)

Instead, I'm just going to work on stuff people care about and work on stuff that will yield results where I can have an impact. And that which is difficult but no one seems to care about, I'll let it go. For now.

That feels good to say that. And it feels good to reflect on the day. And it feels good to get up here so early I still have time to read.

---
http://about.me/James.Lamb

Why, Nissan?

For all that is right and good in the world, why, Nissan, why????

Be Afraid

Honest to God, this was a full-sized cardboard standup at the local non-discount chain movie theater:

Sure, why not?

If you haven't lost a job, perhaps you want to buy a beach house?

Test Again (and then some)

Excellent. I hate the Blogger app on the iPhone and there's no native app
for the iPad, just the enlarged grainy iPhone app. And the Blogger website
itself has some unique (ok, mind-numbingly stupid and frustrating) um,
quirks, about it that makes it difficult to use at best. Oh, and it's super
slow and doesn't capture everything I type. So that's been a barrier to
entry.

Well, until I remembered that Blogger has allowed you to email a post, and
it's not a new option. I used it a few times many. Many years ago. So I
think I'll use this option to post more regularly because I can use the
iPad and iPhone email app just fine. Perhaps too well if you ask my
co-workers.

So, I'm going to try to post more regularly.

I am noticing that it did include my signature, but it was a website
address and ended up as a link in Feeddler from Google Reader. That's good.


A few more tests. I suspect they will fail, but will try anyhow.

<!-- more --> (more test)

<a href="http://tvjames.blogspot.com/">my blog</a> (link test)

#hashtag test $TSLA cashtag test.

<hr>
<hr nshade size="1"> (rule tests)

<table><tr><td>1</td><td>2</></tr></table> (table test)

<font color="#FF6600">orange</font> (color test)

I expect all of these tests to fail, but I want to know what's allowed and
what's not. Sorry/thanks.



---
http://about.me/James.Lamb

Test

This is a test of blogging from email.  

Bold. Italics. Underline. 

---

http://about.me/James.Lamb

Call it a priority maybe

Read a post on Lifehacker recently that's stuck with me - to boil it down, it said "Don't say you don't have time, say it's not a priority.". Sorry, didn't file the TPS reports because I was busy. No, I prioritized something else ahead of it.

I've really been liking it - I've started to try to think about it at work when declining meeting requests or setting aside an email to maybe get to later.

But in my non-work life, I've struggled with it. There are a few things I currently am not doing but would really like to be. But it finally dawned on me tonight - unlike work, not all non-work hours are created equal.

For one item, I need 20-30 minutes of quiet where I can listen to a recording and take notes. This was best done at home while exercising in the morning, but I've had trouble getting up lately. Perhaps I've been prioritizing sleep over that exercise and that podcast, but it's been unavoidable. Other times when I exercise it's either not stationary (at work, outside walking or running) or it's not solitary (while watching TV with Lori).  I do want to start doing those things again, so I have to work harder at getting to sleep sooner or figure out why I now need an extra hour of sleep. I suspect it's the weather.

For another, I need 30-60 minutes weekly during daylight hours to wash the cars. That's actually difficult to come by because there are other chores (priority) but also it's more difficult to do something on my own because that means I'm not helping with the kids and stuff. The solve here is to start paying for car washes again. I can buy extra time.

There's this blog. Clearly not a priority for me this year. Last year I had a goal to blog every day and I did. Plus some in other blogs. Not so this year. That saddens me, but I can fully own it. We'll see if I decide to change that for next year.

And finally exercise. Mixed bag. I could probably create the time for more running. I haven't. Clearly getting down to my goal weight isn't a priority.  That's sad, but at least I can be honest about it.

I am happy with most of my current time choices. There are still things I wish I were doing but am not, but there's little I am doing and wish I weren't. The rest becomes a consideration of both priority and availability of the right kind of hours for the thing I want to do but am not. Or if there's anything so worth getting done that I pay someone else to do it or something else allowing me time to do it myself.

That feels good to think that through. Liberating.

120: Mad Lib

Rachel provided 3 nouns: world, drinks, food.

"You want food?" the elephant asked the squirrel.

The squirrel nodded and then elephant blasted him with water.  "Have a drink first!" He said, laughing.

The poor, wet squirrel ran off crying.  He returned a few minutes later with a Red Panda and a small Arctic Fox.

"Oooh, I'm so scared," the elephant said, laughing.

The started towards him menancingly.  The elephant, it turned out, was scared.  He was a big bully.

He fell down the hill and into their spaceship and they blasted him off into space.  And he had a nice view of the earth.  Until his oxygen ran out.

Worth Repeating: Nicholas Christakis

We're all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits -- from happiness to obesity -- can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don't even know.