Trying to follow

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This is the first of what I hope will be a regular weekly audio summary. I know there are a number of people out there who are more interested in listening to things rather then reading them. I’m going to try and sum up the things that I have written throughout the week in a short and concise audio summary. I’ll point out the comments that have been made a give a little of my reaction to them. Basically it’s just a chance to update our audio subscribers to what’s happening on the blog.

I just finished reading the book QBQ! The Question Behind the Question. It’s a pretty good and very short book about personal accountablity. I was hoping to find some important tips and lessons in it to share with my class, but I didn’t find much. The book is more directed to people who are ready to make the difference and change in their own lives.

Basically the lesson is this: Stop Blaming, Complaining and Procrastinating and start asking what it is you can do to make a difference. I find that that is a really important thing in so many areas in life. In my marriage it’s important for me to ask and spend my time thinking about what differences I can make in my attitude, values and personality, rather then lamenting that my wife needs to change her actions. At work it is hugely important to take responsibility myself rather then pass the blame to others, especially in front of others. I know parent’s have to be really good at this, so that children are raised seeing their parents unified rather then passing blame, a dangerous lesson to learn.

Personal responsibility though, is about you individually being personally responsible and making those changes in your own life. So how do you begin to teach others about that besides modeling it? How do you share and give a lesson in being responsible and accountable for your actions? Maybe I need to hear the author give a presentation to get a better idea.

Again, this is going to be a short apology post as to why I’m not posting more thought provoking stuff these days. I’m working almost 12 hour days this week, which has left little time to sit at home and write. I have been reading a little though. I finished Wicked yesterday. It was interesting, not as exciting as I would have thought, but I still want to see the musical.
I also finished the Taxes last night. That’s an exciting thing when your getting money back (though you sort of kick yourself for having let the government hold on to it for that long). After finishing the Taxes I was able to finish the FAFSA for mindy’s school, some how they think we have a lot of money to use for school, funny how that works.
And haircuts. I mentioned the haircut, I look pretty goofy right now, but my students are loving it and that’s what this was all about. Monday I’ll shave my whole head and then I have to decide what I’ll do with the beard. That’s life in these parts.

Sorry folks, it’s been a busy time. Last week Mindy was on Spring Break and I didn’t have time to write much (though I was able to publish some of my drafts, so you didn’t notice). Then I surprised my friend Zach in Florida this weekend, so I wasn’t bored and sitting at my computer typing. And now I’m working nearly 12 hour days all week. I think this weekend I’ll have a chance to settle down but for now it’s just go go go.

In other news, today they are sending out the first issue of Excel magazine, in which my first two published in print (and paid) articles are in. I’m pretty excited about that. I’ll see if I can post the articles online for folks to read after it’s out.

More later, for now it’s time to bike to work.

P.S. I also got a crazy haircut by my students, if you want to look I upload a couple pics to flickr (look bottom right).

It took quite a bit of time to win my friend Zach over to the joys of Firefox, but he eventually saw the light. But, just like me, Zach doesn’t like a slow computer. When he wants to check something online quickly, he’s still been using IE cause it loads faster on his computer. You might have noticed the same thing, which is why today’s Tech is all about speeding up your computer.

Prefetching Firefox
The reason IE runs quickly is Microsoft set it up so that it’s ‘ready to run’ or prefetched. You can easily do this manually for any other program:

1. Right-click on the program icon
2. Select properties
3. In the ‘Target’ box, add ” /prefetch:1″ at the end of the line.
4. Click ‘Ok’

Speed things up by doing this to any program you use regularly.

Simple programs for Simple Tasks
Besides your internet browser the second most used program is probably a word processor. Many have Microsoft Word, though if you don’t I’d highly recommend OpenOffice as a complete alternative. BUT, I’d also recommend you stop using MS Word quite so much.

If what your writing doesn’t need any formatting why not just pop open notepad? If you want it to look a little prettier you could use Wordpad (both located in your accessories folder). These programs run SO much faster then word or OpenOffice and they work for probably 40% of your needs.

For the other 60% I think I should mention AbiWord. It looks a lot more like Word and has most of the most common features. Give it a whirl and save plenty of time in the process.