When you think of Canada do you think of Mac and Cheese?
You should.
I don’t think any of this was a surprise to me, but my UK contacts might be interested to learn about my adoptive home…
Category: Blog
When you think of Canada do you think of Mac and Cheese?
You should.
I don’t think any of this was a surprise to me, but my UK contacts might be interested to learn about my adoptive home…
When you think of Canada do you think of Mac and Cheese?
You should.
I don’t think any of this was a surprise to me, but my UK contacts might be interested to learn about my adoptive home…
Meet Charlie Brown. Here he is, relaxing in the sun in front of our living room patio door. He’s a Yorkshire Terrier, he turns five years old next month, you can follow him on twitter, and he’s the smartest dog in our family.
Well OK, he’s our only dog. But that’s besides the point. He’s still pretty smart.
I’ve been teaching him about ROWE.
Given that I do at least half my work from home and Charlie lives here too, it’s important that he understands that work is a thing that I do, not a place that I go.
If I’m heading into the office then I make sure I use the language “going to the office” as I’m leaving and I tell him where I’m going (as opposed to “going to work”). I reserve the word “work” to describe why I can’t be disturbed and I’m unavailable for ball throwing or belly rubs or other things that rank highly on Charlie’s list of priorities.
He gets it. If I tell him I’m working then he either goes and amuses himself elsewhere or sits quietly on the sofa in my home-office to keep me company.
Now if only I could make him understand that people on speakerphone are not, in fact, intruders and don’t require barking at then we’d be golden.
Meet Charlie Brown. Here he is, relaxing in the sun in front of our living room patio door. He’s a Yorkshire Terrier, he turns five years old next month, you can follow him on twitter, and he’s the smartest dog in our family.
Well OK, he’s our only dog. But that’s besides the point. He’s still pretty smart.
I’ve been teaching him about ROWE.
Given that I do at least half my work from home and Charlie lives here too, it’s important that he understands that work is a thing that I do, not a place that I go.
If I’m heading into the office then I make sure I use the language “going to the office” as I’m leaving and I tell him where I’m going (as opposed to “going to work”). I reserve the word “work” to describe why I can’t be disturbed and I’m unavailable for ball throwing or belly rubs or other things that rank highly on Charlie’s list of priorities.
He gets it. If I tell him I’m working then he either goes and amuses himself elsewhere or sits quietly on the sofa in my home-office to keep me company.
Now if only I could make him understand that people on speakerphone are not, in fact, intruders and don’t require barking at then we’d be golden.
Meet Charlie Brown. Here he is, relaxing in the sun in front of our living room patio door. He’s a Yorkshire Terrier, he turns five years old next month, you can follow him on twitter, and he’s the smartest dog in our family.
Well OK, he’s our only dog. But that’s besides the point. He’s still pretty smart.
I’ve been teaching him about ROWE.
Given that I do at least half my work from home and Charlie lives here too, it’s important that he understands that work is a thing that I do, not a place that I go.
If I’m heading into the office then I make sure I use the language “going to the office” as I’m leaving and I tell him where I’m going (as opposed to “going to work”). I reserve the word “work” to describe why I can’t be disturbed and I’m unavailable for ball throwing or belly rubs or other things that rank highly on Charlie’s list of priorities.
He gets it. If I tell him I’m working then he either goes and amuses himself elsewhere or sits quietly on the sofa in my home-office to keep me company.
Now if only I could make him understand that people on speakerphone are not, in fact, intruders and don’t require barking at then we’d be golden.
Extract a List of Values Filtered by Criteria with Sub-Arrays in Excel
Learn how to build a dynamic list filtered by criteria in Excel with sub-arrays using INDEX and SMALL. Step-by-step instructions and downloadable example.
If you’re not careful then array functions in Excel can quite easily melt your brain and cause it to leak out through your various face-holes, so I’m finding this step-by-step guide especially useful this morning.
Extract a List of Values Filtered by Criteria with Sub-Arrays in Excel
Overhauling my Digital Life
If you’ve been reading or watching the news recently you’ll no doubt have heard about the Heartbleed bug that’s been widely reported. It’s a vulnerability in the OpenSSL library that many websites use to enable the SSL/TLS encryption that secures your traffic to that site, keeping your passwords and credit card information safe.
It’s probably about time to go and update all your passwords (although you should wait until the site tells you to, because they need to patch the bug and reissue their SSL certificates before they’re properly protected and not all sites will have done this yet), but all this coincidentally comes when I’m in the midst of a plan to get my digital life in order.
There are a couple of things I’ve done recently that, in truth, I should have done a long time ago – and you should do them too.
Backup
First of all, an experiment: raise your hand if you think backing up your data to a remote location is a good idea, or perhaps even an essential practice. OK? Now keep your hand raised if actually do this.
Right, that’s what I thought. Until the start of this month I would also have sheepishly lowered my hand at the second question. At home we have a server that handles the syncing of documents between our several computers – the result being that all those really important files exist in a few places, including the server itself. That’s not bad, but if there were some kind of catastrophe affecting our home then everything would be lost because it’s all in one physical location.
And it gets worse. The server has a 1TB drive that was big enough to back up all our photos, video and music when I bought it. It’s still big enough to hold all that stuff, but as our collection of digital assets like that has grown there’s no longer room on the individual computers to store everything. Not a big deal – all that stuff is on the server anyway and we can just stream it to whatever device we want to play things on. Fine, except now there’s only one copy of all our photos and music. If the drive in the server failed we’d lose all that stuff. For me that’s more than a decade of pictures.
In the past I’ve been unwilling to spend the money necessary to get enough cloud backup space to put all this stuff in, but prices have dropped recently (which really is what prompted me to look at my needs) and anyway, this really is something worth paying for.
I got myself 100GB of online storage from ADrive. I don’t know that I’d recommend them for everyone because the transfer speed I get when I upload stuff is pretty slow, but for me it’s perfect: they’re a good price ($25 a year) and I can upload files using rsync, which means it’s extremely easy for me to set up automated backup jobs on our server without needing to install anything. I don’t really need a super-fast transfer speed because my future backup jobs will be incremental (only uploading files that have changed) and syncing documents between computers is not a need – we already have that.
Two-Factor Authentication
The other big upgrade to my digital life recently has been two-factor authentication. I’ve known of it for a while, although I hadn’t used it at all until recently. Basically though it’s for website logins, and the two factors it talks of are something you know (your password) and something you have (your cell phone).
I’ve turned on two-factor authentication wherever I could, using the Google Authenticator app from the play store where possible, and text messaging elsewhere. Essentially the way this works is that when you sign in to a website using your username and password, you’re prompted to enter a code you get either from the app or texted to you – the point being that even if somebody knew your username and password, if they don’t have your phone they won’t be able to log in.
I’ve enabled this on Google (Gmail, drive, etc), facebook, twitter, tumblr, Evernote, PayPal and anywhere else I could find that offers it too.
Five Essential Windows 8.1 Time-Saving Tweaks
Bypass the lock screen; boot directly to the desktop; add app shortcuts to the Start menu; use one hand to drag and drop items via your laptop’s touch pad; and shut down quickly via keyboard shortcuts. Read this article by Dennis O’Reilly on CNET.
I just installed Windows 8.1. It only took about 10 minutes to get things set up the way I wanted them, but I hated the default settings.
Also, this: How to Sign Into Windows 8 Without a Microsoft Account
Do Not Trigger Real Event Names with jQuery!
Avoid triggering real event names when using jQuery’s trigger method.
I post this link because I was writing some code earlier in the week and I was about to do exactly what this article tells us all not to do. Then I happened upon David Walsh’s article here and it actually led me to an even better solution than the one he suggests.
Until I read this I had no idea you could define your own custom events in jQuery and then trigger them later, but the winning solution is actually proposed by somebody in the comments section on David’s site: you can namespace your custom-named events. So:
$('#element').on('click.tabs', function() {
....
}
gets triggered when the element is actually clicked, or can be triggered programmatically with
$('#element').trigger('click.tabs');
the beauty here is that no other click events assigned to that element or its parents get triggered – we’re specifically targeting the namespaced event. If you’ve accidentally defined two .click() handling functions, or if there’s a .click() function on the parent element, the programmatic trigger doesn’t flow through to them.
Here’s a demo of what I’m talking about. Check out the difference between the three “trigger” links.