How Not to Work efficiently - II

Sessions, meetings, clients, VPs, trainings, new projects, proposals...........the week was packed like hell. Finally, Friday is here and last day in training. So, yes I got some new work, which is really interesting work and moreover it will help our clients to compete better in market, making it critical as well. This will go on for probably another 2 weeks and then after few weeks I may be flying to East Coast, US ....yiipppiiiieeeeeeee. My DSLR is on cards ... :-) It will be my second time to east coast, though I like West Coast now :).

And my hunt for a window manager finally came to an end, I went through another list of 60 odd applications, tried few of them and finally found one, which is close to what I was looking for.

"Actual Window Manager" is the solution to some of my problems, but still lacks few things that would have made it ultimate. It's a great tool that can help anyone like me, who wants to work on 10 things simultanously but gets lost withing in windows. :)

****** 5 stars from me to this application.

Here's what I would call classic painting of nature; sunlight reflection making the water look like silver, a boat, a hammock faraway and a few clouds in sky; just PEFECT!!!!! This is again Andamans

Download Full Version here

How not to work efficiently.

After being frustrated for quite long time because of my work and running out of my patience, which usually doesn’t happen too often, I have finally stopped working :) I do go to office, but just to have fun, meet friends and checkout the girls :) - work, not any more.
While spending time over the Friday in office, I decided to search for a tool that can help me unclutter the windows on my desktop and have me work (not necessarily official, it can also mean chatting) efficiently.
At any given time I have at least 10 different windows on my desktop and sometimes they increase to 25. Few things that I have been doing, since my college time, to help me with this problem is to increase the width of my taskbar to a level that it can hold 3 rows of windows. The advantages are multi folds: it accommodates more windows, the clock now shows date, day, and time, and the quick launch can accommodate more shortcuts. And the 15.4” screen still maintains a good view :) Another thing that I do to increase efficiency is to place shortcut toolbars on all over my desktop. These toolbars are in auto-hide mode, they contain shortcuts to most of the items that I access frequently and they are all over the place on top, left and right.
But now, since the windows on my desktop have increased, I need something which can help me efficiently work with these windows. And if you are thinking that may be I am not aware of Alt-Tab or may be grouping feature available in windows, then you are wrong. Alt-Tab doesn’t work really well if you have 25 windows open, I get lost easily and more over it’s painful on my little hands to stretch all the way from Alt to Tab. J

So, I browsed through a list of over 100 applications on download.com and finally closed on 4 applications:

Entbloess – this is my pick, it’s customizable, nice interface, easy to use.
TopDesk – works on same principle as does entbloess, but eats too much of memory.
WinGlance – good, similar to entbloess, but very less customization.
WinTiles – this wasn’t what I was really looking, it just tiles all the windows, moreover, it was rubbish, I really didn’t get hang of how to use this one.

First three applications in above list work on same principle: take snapshot of all windows on the desktop, show all of them at same time, and allow you to choose.

Though they are helpful but it’s not really what I was looking for, my hunt will continue in next blog. Stay Tuned !!!!

Below is the enclosure used by British jailers to punish the Indian freedom fighters, they were treated badly and were tied here around this machine, which is used to get oil out of seeds.

Location: Kalapaani Jail, Andaman, India

Time: 2/16/2006

The Best Damn Thing

It has been quite a while since I wrote anything. What's has been keeping me busy are, no it's not work don't do that anymore :), virtualization & The Best Damn Thing. Just found this cool thing called virtualization, it allows you to run multiple OSes on same box simultanously. During my college days, I used to wonder why is this not possible and they just made it possible.

What's more, we had to set-up a new box, it's a big a$$ box, for our team and the ball was thrown to me. I just finished setting it up few hours back, and now we have Linux and Windows running on same box, that too simultanously. But the litmus test will be next week when team will start hitting it.

Next is The Best Damn Thing, it's the latest album from Avril Lavigne and I think I have probably heard it 50 times. Just love it, especially the electric guitar !!!! I need to think about cutting my work hours and take guitar lessons :D

I just studied this new trick from photography magazine, not sure what it is called but it is cool and easy. Just select a portion of image, copy it on to another layer. Adjust the "Hue" of new layer and then merge all the layers. As Simple as That.

Here's the original picture:

And here is the modified one.
I created 4-5 different layers for each portion of image that I wanted to change and then merged all of them later.

If you zoom this image you will see all the mess that I created while selecting different pieces. It needs to be done with a mouse and not with a touchpad. And as usual my color selection is not that great :)